IBM i (OS/400) the Database Operating System

nnaves about 6 hours ago 12 commentsRead Article on osadmins.com

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theandrewbailey•about 1 hour ago

> Here we reach a point that is simultaneously the platform’s greatest advantage and heaviest burden. Due to such deep integration with dedicated and expensive hardware, IBM i is an “elite” system, in the less positive sense. A mere mortal, computer science student, or enthusiast has no chance to “touch” this system in the comfort of their home. You cannot download an ISO image from the internet, install it on a virtual machine in VirtualBox, or run it on your laptop. The barrier to entry is set at the price level of an IBM Power server, which effectively cuts off the supply of “fresh blood” and makes knowledge of this fascinating architecture passed down almost like guild knowledge, only within large organizations.

I took a course about these back in college. I thought it would be mind-expanding to see how computing could be outside of conventional Windows/Unix/Linux inspired environments, and use something with a very different design. The instructor had a desktop of one of these in his office. I remember logging into an official IBM educational system with a terminal emulator for an assignment.

Unfortunately, the instructor left about a month in, and I switched to a course involving UML modeling for programming Lego Mindstorm robots. Being hands-on with Mindstorms was cool, but I wonder what could have been had I finished the other course.

chiph•2 minutes ago

You can get IBM i (OS/400) running at home, but the hurdles are many. You need to have one of a specific set of PowerPC servers and need to "acquire" an operating system image. Which will be running in unlicensed demo mode. This YouTuber did it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUwJk81YatA

It's long been said that the biggest obstacle to wider adoption of the AS/400 is IBM itself. They offer classes, but don't make it easy - you have to join COMMON (their user group) and/or be enrolled in a university.

https://www.ibm.com/university/power/ibmi/

Angostura•about 1 hour ago

Amusingly, however - IBM did produce - or worked on - a Laptop AS/400, based on PowerPC for purely internal use. I believe it was designed for sales/marketing types to take on the road for demos

rwmj•about 1 hour ago

I'd recommend people read "Inside the AS400" by Frank G. Soltis, as the concepts behind the OS are quite strange and unlike anything else I've ever seen. Unfortunately paper copies are pretty expensive, but there's a high quality PDF floating around on Bittorrent.

rbanffy•about 1 hour ago

The article makes me feel the author doesn’t have a deep understanding of some of the mechanisms. TIMI, iirc, is similar to Java (or Smalltalk) bytecode. I’m not sure it’s translated to native instructions on install or on module load, but the native code is kept so that the compilation doesn’t need to happen again. It’s as if the JVM saved a .nativeclass file when a .class file is loaded (kind of one level lower than what Python does, turning a .py file into a .pyc, or .pyo).

The concept of a flat object space we saw in Smalltalk and Lisps (the “system image”) would be seen again, kind of, in the Newton, the Palm, and, IIRC, in Taligent’s Pink. It’s a shame the IBMi is so poorly documented (in sharp contrast with its Z big brother) that no emulator capable of booting OS/400 images exists.

It’s not that this approach is perfect though - it’s really hard to bootstrap a Smalltalk image from scratch. I assume making an IBMi image without a running IBMi system would be similarly challenging.

variodot•about 2 hours ago

IBM i was k8s before k8s, with fewer yaml files and better backwards compat

Some of my first exposure to enterprise IT was via the AS/400 and served as a fantastic basis for the cloud stack and agents of today.

bombcar•about 2 hours ago

We live in the shattered remains, badly reconstructed, of what a true operating system could be - we have some of the pieces (zfs, k8s, virtualization, scaling, failover, nixos, qubes) but imagine it all put together, orchestrated, carefully documented and tested by immense number of engineers. Ah, what could have been.

tmsbrg•about 1 hour ago

The problem is license costs. IBM makes a great system but almost all their customers have been working hard to replace it, not because of issues with the quality but the high license costs.

antaviana•about 1 hour ago

IBM AS/400 lineup was fully designed to optimize customer segmentation and threfore capture better the customer value. For example, there were cheaper models where the hardware was exactly the same as more expensive models except for additional hardware loops to make things run slower. That’s why they had so many models, they wanted to have a price point available for every company size.

actionfromafar•about 2 hours ago

The older I get, the more compelling the IBM universe seems.

jiggawatts•about 1 hour ago

This is what it feels like to look in at Linux from the outside as a Windows admin used to corporate-enforced consistency.

Sure, Microsoft has stumbled a bit recently, but around the 2010s it was a glorious era of PowerShell and Windows Server releases that were still improving.

bombcar•about 1 hour ago

I remember being quite young and proud that I had built something using Samba and Kerberos that mimicked an NT domain controller, and how powerful it was for our little LAN in the dorm, and why would anyone pay M$ for this, and then barely a few years later using small business server and being like "oh, that's why".