[HN Gopher] Inside an IBM AS/400 eSeries Factory [video]
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Inside an IBM AS/400 eSeries Factory [video]
        
       Author : grunthos
       Score  : 32 points
       Date   : 2022-07-30 10:09 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
        
       | floresmd wrote:
       | Thanks for trip down memory lane. These machines were rock solid.
        
       | lowken wrote:
       | About three years id my software development career were
       | detonated to AS/400 RPG programming. It was fun but I'm glad I
       | moved on.
        
         | GnarfGnarf wrote:
         | Gasp! You poor soul :o) RPG (Report Program Generator) is the
         | worst programming language on the face of the Earth. Its
         | paradigm is the IBM 402 tabulator.
        
           | doctor_eval wrote:
           | Thank you for clearing up my cognitive dissonance. I mean,
           | how many people had jobs programming RPGs? How many people
           | possibly played role playing games on AS/400?
        
       | ThinkBeat wrote:
       | These machines were amazing. Rock solid. Never crashed, never
       | need someone to reboot it and if something went wrong it would
       | call IBM and say it needed service and what components were
       | impacted (if it knew).
       | 
       | In some companies these things were in a closet, under piles of
       | other things and everyone had forgotten about its existence.
       | 
       | Then comes the IBM rep to fix it and there is confusion about its
       | existence.
       | 
       | The operating system was genuinely interesting. I wish they had
       | open sourced it.
       | 
       | They were not sexy, they didnt have games (actually a couple) did
       | run much sofwtware you knwo about but that it did it was very
       | good at.
        
         | bluepizza wrote:
         | They are so slow, though. DB2 and API performances are
         | atrocious. This is a machine designed to run batch jobs, and
         | nothing else.
        
       | snowAbstraction wrote:
       | Thanks, this brought back some memories. I did an internship /
       | co-op in software engineering at that site in Rochester while a
       | student. They needed extra help so I worked a few evenings at 1.5
       | pay alongside the regular factory workers.
        
       | 1MachineElf wrote:
       | I wonder if this is how Oxide Computer is building their systems
       | in 2022.
        
         | nikau wrote:
         | Interesting to read some of the hype around 0xide, it seems
         | like its just some software ontop of a blade system?
        
           | jgalt212 wrote:
           | Perhaps, but if their secret sauce produces a much better
           | product, I'm not terribly concerned that the value-add is a
           | software-based and not hardware-based.
        
           | unixhero wrote:
           | No dude. They are reimagining the firmware and ROMs on the
           | mother board, and so on. I recommend looking further into it.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2022-07-31 23:00 UTC)