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Comment by rjsw | Hacker News Reader

There is a lot that isn't in that wiki page that has been posted to usenet.

The 3033 wasn't supposed to happen, the System/370 family was expected to be replaced by the Future Systems project [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Future_Systems_project

It's really interesting that, while the Future Systems project was cancelled, a lot of it went into the AS/400, which lives to this day as the IBM i (now based on POWER). It was so far ahead of its time that some of it is still well ahead of our time.

I work in an IBM i shop and concur that it is a powerful and elegant machine. All the old hats who've worked on it for most of their life, at least in my experience, still refer to it as the AS/400, rather than referring to it as the IBM i (before it was called IBM i, it was called System i).

Despite this, I can confirm that many of our non-tech savvy users and managers think of the machine as old and antiquated simply because of the way most of our user-base interfaces with the machine (TN5250 connection - green screen). I kid you not, many of the managers think we'd be better off replacing our IBM i with a new out-of-the-box machine, despite the fact that we have decades of homegrown programs and processes that have been built and customized on the i.

I think OS/400 has some really cool technology at the lower levels of its stack, but the applications running on top rarely really took advantage of them.

You start with an advanced machine-independent single-level store capability-oriented operating system, and then you use it to run RPG code???

OS/400 was based on an object-oriented idea. And yet, only IBM could ever define new object types. But IBM went ahead and defined all kinds of random obscure object types [1][2] for all kinds of obscure requirements, many of which are now quite legacy. It would have been far more powerful if IBM had opened it up and allowed end-users and ISVs to define object types of their own.

One thing always holding OS/400 back, is that it has never been a self-hosting operating system. OS/400 has never been able to compile itself, and the OS/400 development team didn't run OS/400. The code for the core of OS/400 was maintained on a mainframe running VM/CMS, which hosted cross-compilers (for PL/MP, PL/MI, etc); OS/400 developers would transfer the compiled code to an actual AS/400 for testing. Around the time of the RISC transition, the development OS changed from VM/CMS to AIX.

[1] https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/ssw_ibm_i_74/api...

[2] https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/ssw_ibm_i_74/rba...

> non-tech savvy users and managers think of the machine as old and antiquated

People need to be educated about the power of a good text-based interface. And I'll say the well laid out 3270/5250 screens are much nicer than trying to understand what Kubernetes or docker are trying to say with thousand-character lines.

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