Hacker News Reader

Comment by speed_spread | Hacker News Reader

All the inconvenient of using an AS/400 without the advantage of having an IBM designed coffee table in the living room as a conversation piece.

View on HN

Most AS/400's are tucked in the back corner of a warehouse workshop closet, absolutely slathered in dust. There's coax cables for 5250 terminals. A musty smell.

In the workshop, blue collar workers can bang out commands and instructions faster than a grey beard computer scientist at MIT running their entire life in EMACS.

Only one or two people know where that AS/400 lives. It's power supply was hot swapped 21 years ago.

Agreed. They are workhorses that keep on running. If/when a piece of hardware fails like a disk or RAM it gets hotplugged via the Hardware Management Console [1] and since it has single level storage [2] all pages in RAM are protected for 48 hours in the event of a catastrophic power failure.

[1] https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/POWER5/iphan_p5/iphanbook.pdf

[2] https://community.ibm.com/community/user/power/discussion/ib...

When you change a table in DB2 and add a field, you have to rewrite all of your RPG programs that use that table.

Hot garbage that obliterates our production times, as far as I can tell.

normally, yes/kinda(though not REWRITE actually just RECOMPILE - no code changes unless you need to use the new field) . that happens. though you can abstract file access and use a modular approach to do that and only recompile that abstraction layer (think Hibernate but for the old days)

keep in mind the system used this as a safety feature. to make sure that you dont blow off your foot with incorrect access to the file.

> Most AS/400's are tucked in the back corner of a warehouse workshop closet, absolutely slathered in dust

In the 1990s, my dad worked in a pharmaceutical factory. The whole factory was run by a single AS/400. Being the pharmaceutical industry, it was all very clean, no dust anywhere to be seen. Their server room, complete with raised floor, seemed rather barren – all it contained was the AS/400, a tape drive, and a couple of Netware servers. The operator sat in an adjoining room, able to observe the servers through a large glass window. In high school my dad got me an unpaid internship for two weeks in their IT department, but sadly they refused to give me a login to the AS/400. Closest I got, was they had a contractor writing RPG code in the cubicle next to mine, and he let me look over his shoulder.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com