[HN Gopher] Satya Nadella uses an IBM AS/400 in 1993
___________________________________________________________________
Satya Nadella uses an IBM AS/400 in 1993
Author : klelatti
Score : 220 points
Date : 2024-02-14 11:35 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (thechipletter.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (thechipletter.substack.com)
| NikkiA wrote:
| Having the monitor that low and tilted upwards was surely against
| all ergonomic guidelines, even then.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| I guess it was arranged that way in order to give ample view on
| the presenter rather than the back of a bulky monitor.
| prmoustache wrote:
| I noticed the 2 mouses. Now I understand why I had to switch to
| linux and BSDs. Nobody told me I needed 2 pointing devices to
| be happy on windows.
| ben7799 wrote:
| I'm not sure I ever saw a height adjustable monitor till LCD
| screens started appearing.
|
| My first desktop LCD was a Sony and did not height adjust.
|
| Some people had furniture that raised the monitor up. Other
| people had the monitor stacked on top of the computer itself,
| and the "stack of books" thing was around.
| scaglio wrote:
| > Thirty years later, a lot has changed. The AS/400 has (mostly)
| gone
|
| Well, not exactly. IBMi is still widely used, as an "affordable,
| low cost mainframe".
| klelatti wrote:
| Fair comment. I was thinking of the original AS/400 hardware
| but AS/400 is used to refer the later PowerPC versions (which I
| guess Nadella would have been using here) and IBMi.
| muragekibicho wrote:
| Satya Nadella has hair in the picture. I really didn't expect
| that
| augustk wrote:
| Why do you expect a 26-year-old to be bald?
| krylon wrote:
| I've met a few people who had a clearly visible bald spot at
| that age (including my father, fortunately I got my hair from
| my mother). Not many, but it happens.
| voxadam wrote:
| In his memoir, _Making It So_ , Patrick Stewart (Jean-Luc
| Picard, Professor X, etc.) said that he was noticeably
| balding at 17 and was more or less completely bald by 19.
| Stewart may be an extreme case but a sizeable population of
| men lose a substantial amount of their hair before 26.
| Suppafly wrote:
| yeah it's kinda weird that we associate baldness with age,
| most of the people that get it genetically seem to start
| balding at a young age. I have a friend that started losing
| it in his teens and had lost enough to constantly wear hats
| by college.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Some are? :)
|
| I started balding early 20s but some of my friends in late
| teens.
| tr33house wrote:
| In 93, I was a baby. I'm now at least a Senior Eng in many orgs.
| It's impressive, at the very least, that Satya stayed in
| Microsoft that long
| vsnf wrote:
| What's even more impressive than his tenure is his trajectory
| from sales grunt to CEO.
| TillE wrote:
| I dunno exactly what a "technical marketing manager" is, but
| Nadella had a master's in computer science at that point, so
| I doubt he was just a sales guy.
| quonn wrote:
| Having these kind of roles with a strong technical
| background is typical for Microsoft. They have a parallel
| management and technical hierarchy all the way to the top.
| Everyone should copy this, so much talent is lost by good
| people going into management where they often aren't even
| that good.
| TMWNN wrote:
| It sounds like what a police officer described in an AMA;
| it's possible to move from uniform to plainclothes
| detective, or stay in uniform on patrol, for one's entire
| career without penalty to salary. <https://np.reddit.com/
| r/SouthLAndTV/comments/1di5yq/i_am_cop...>
| alephnerd wrote:
| > I dunno exactly what a "technical marketing manager" is
|
| A TMM/TME is a hybrid role support role consisting of
| functions of a Dev Advocate, PM, and PMM.
|
| While PMM would own non-technical GTM and enablement, the
| TMM/TME would own technical GTM and enablement.
|
| It's an older role common in 90s era companies like Cisco,
| Palo Alto Networks, etc though is has been renamed as
| Technical Product Management now in most orgs (eg.
| Lacework, Netskope, etc)
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Technical chops make the solutioning and customer
| relationship part easier.
|
| Whatever tech expertise Nadella has, his EQ and ability to
| navigate the toxic and vicious politics of Microsoft is his
| superpower. They aren't as in your face hostile as Oracle,
| but they are cutthroat.
| ryandrake wrote:
| That's what struck me, too. Here's a guy who looks and talks
| like some rando young really smart technical dude, like the
| hundreds I've met over my career. He doesn't appear to have
| those Ivy Leaguer mannerisms, not some tweed blazer-wearing,
| popped collar, McKinsey BankingConsultant, who you always
| expect to end up as all your C-level execs. This guy doing
| the demo could have been you or I. Yet here I still am in my
| late 40s still an IC worker bee at the bottom of the org
| chart, and here he is running the most valuable company in
| the world. How can you not believe in randomness?
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| In my opinion the most talented don't always succeed in the
| wildest ways but they do succeed to a pretty large extent.
| In an alternative timeline bill gates might not be the
| richest man heading up one of the largest companies but he
| would definitely have been a very successful
| multimillionaire banker, lawyer etc...
| geodel wrote:
| This is insightful comment. I feel the same. Impossible
| level of success is most likely random. But a decent
| level of success is achievable with sustained effort in
| their particular domain
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It feels like few people stay at one company for more than a
| few years these days, but then conversely, it also feels like
| companies are set up in a way that makes most people
| replaceable.
|
| Note that my take is biased, I've been a "consultant" for most
| of my career which is a glorified temp, and you end up in
| projects and organizations that hires temps. I tried an old
| fashioned product company once, it wasn't for me (nothing in
| common with my colleagues who were 20-30 years my senior, and
| they and the company were happy just plodding along until
| retirement)
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > but then conversely, it also feels like companies are set
| up in a way that makes most people replaceable
|
| How else would you set up a business that's robust to people
| moving on to new things?
| dustingetz wrote:
| startups are not set up like that
| robertlagrant wrote:
| That seems: a) far too broad - if an HR assistant can't
| be replaced at a startup, why not? and b) a calculated
| risk - for certain things key people are just necessary
| to begin with, and if they leave it causes a massive
| issue. Startups aren't choosing that issue; they are just
| hoping it doesn't materialise until they have the normal
| way of doing things in place.
| Zelphyr wrote:
| I believe that if a company treats their employees with
| respect (automatically give them cost-of-living raises
| without them having to ask for it, for example) and like
| humans instead of cogs in a machine, keep them
| intellectually challenged and fulfilled, and give them a
| sense of meaning and purpose, then they're likely to stay
| much longer. If you're doing that then they're giving your
| customers the same attention. So maybe you have a thriving
| business that employees will stay at for their entire
| career.
|
| Contrasting that with my experience I can name one company
| in 30 years that did that. As is so often the case in our
| society, everybody is doing it backwards and wondering why
| everything is broken.
| ponector wrote:
| Also the best strategy for the last 10+ years was to move
| around frequently. Change jobs every year (or two if you can
| change projects inside one job). As the result you have much
| more salary and experience.
|
| But everyone will bullshit you to stay as long as possible
| with little salary rise.
|
| But with current market it is better to stay for longer if
| you have "okay" project.
| greggsy wrote:
| In complex technical environments, it often doesn't make
| sense to have an in-depth expert assigned to every system.
| You get a consultant in to set it all up and get the gears
| moving, but you can often get less experienced, or more
| versatile, people in to keep it running.
|
| Also, the demand for skills has been silly for the past
| 20-odd years, so there's less incentive stick around, other
| than money. Loyalty rarely pays off, unless you're talking
| shares.
| opportune wrote:
| Microsoft is one of the few companies that seems to do a good
| job allowing employees to rise through the ranks from top to
| bottom. Most of the Partners I have met were cultivated
| internally. Facebook is also like this, with the added bonus
| of allowing much faster progression for high performers than
| most other companies (I know someone who became an E6
| Engineering Manager/Tech Lead 3 years out of college. I don't
| think it was necessarily for "bullshit" either, his work was
| very fundamental and important to the company).
|
| But this is rather rare and most companies have a soft
| ceiling for growth internally. At Google for example, for
| years they have been filling most Director positions
| externally, and so most employees find it very hard to get
| there and progress past that. Progression is also often
| subject to norms that make the sheer number of promotions
| required to make it high up in the company impossible.
| mynameisash wrote:
| When I moved to the PNW, it was for Amazon, and during my
| interview loop, I asked everyone, "How long have you been at
| the company?" They all had pretty much the same answer: three
| months, five months, eight months, and some that had been
| there for a few years.
|
| But I decided to get out of Dodge and interviewed at
| Microsoft, and I asked everyone the same question. The
| responses were shocking to me: five years, ten years, 12
| years, 22 years. One person even told me that he hadn't been
| with the company very long: only 18 years. And he wasn't
| being coy.
|
| I've been at Microsoft for more than ten years, and I still
| feel like the new guy. I started at the tail end of the
| Ballmer days, and I'm sure it was a real grind back then, but
| I'm glad to see a company that -- in my experience -- treats
| people well enough that they'll stick around.
| osrec wrote:
| Impressive in that he was probably quite political and thick-
| skinned?
| burnerburnson wrote:
| Personally I find it depressing. He could have retired years
| ago to work on a passion project. Why is he still dealing
| with the soul-sucking internal politics of a mega-corp?
| Unless he somehow enjoys walking on egg shells all day, it
| doesn't make sense to me.
| twodave wrote:
| I think, as you alluded to, this may be more of a
| personality thing, e.g. an empath might see that sort of
| thing as a great opportunity.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Have you considered that maybe this is his passion project?
| hulitu wrote:
| trully impressive taking into account Microsoft's toxic culture
| of disposing after yearly review of those who did not performed
| so well.
| beastman82 wrote:
| He seems pretty polished at even 26 and he's CEO now so I
| doubt they were an issue at any point.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| It's actually a tried-and-tested way to go up the ladder.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Is it? It really depends on the organization. I've seen
| leadership being hired from the outside many times and it's
| devastating for morale.
| pjmlp wrote:
| During 93's Summer, I was doing my technical school internship,
| which required among other duties, to start backup jobs on an
| AS/400.
| mulmen wrote:
| I don't have a lot of AS/400 experience but I have done my share
| of swearing at Excel. I'm curious to see the reverse
| demonstration. Move data from Excel to the AS/400 and see all the
| options that then become available.
| chasil wrote:
| There is a full instance of db2 inside it, so good SQL
| capabilities are certainly included.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > The AS/400 has (mostly) gone (partly replaced by Microsoft's
| own Azure?)
|
| Er - no.
| klelatti wrote:
| > Fair comment. I was thinking of the original AS/400 hardware
| but AS/400 is used to refer the later PowerPC versions (which I
| guess Nadella would have been using here) and IBMi.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I meant it's not replaced by Azure! :-)
| sillywalk wrote:
| The first PowerPC based AS/400e didn't come out until '95, so
| Satya would've been using the CISC IMPI versions.
| klelatti wrote:
| Thank you!
| mmcgaha wrote:
| We are replacing our 400 with Azure. We are moving to D365 F&O
| from the ERP that we have been running for the last thirty
| years. It is in the best interest for the company but I have to
| admit that I will be a little sad the day we power it down for
| the last time.
| patja wrote:
| When I was there (part of the project), it all went to SAP R/3
| on SQL Server and Windows. But I left in 2008 and I'm sure they
| have changed a few things since then :)
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| The AS/400 was the most reliable server I have ever worked with.
| They tended to just work month after month.
|
| I am not saying it is the most reliable server in the world,
| because there are a lot I have not worked with, but it was far
| more reliable than anything else I have worked on.
|
| IF something did go wrong, they would at times call IBM and ask
| for service before the customer had any knowledge of an issue.
|
| My mother became the AS/400 sys admin at her company and she had
| no idea about servers or technical sides of computers. She
| changed the backup tapes on a schedule and that was it .
|
| Many places nobody knew where the box was since nobody interacted
| with it on a physical level. Green screen terminals or terminal
| apps on Windows was the norm.
|
| Some business had them for inventory / sales / accounting and so
| on.
|
| Many places nobody knew where the box was since nobody interacted
| with it on a physical level. Green screen terminals or terminal
| apps on Windows was the norm.
|
| There were a couple of simple games (not from IBM) you could
| download and play, but it wasn't worth it.
|
| There were some drawbacks, but Id love to have one to play with.
| chasil wrote:
| The modern "i" series machines are just POWER processors on a
| standard server.
|
| It's unlikely that anything under a 14nm process node is used
| for the CPU, if that.
|
| IBM has deep knowledge in high-availability systems, but it's
| unlikely that you could call these more advanced than a modern
| 5nm Ryzen server.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| You don't understand where AS-400 real power comes from. DB
| integrated directly into filesystem, you optimize your work
| for how the whole system has been designed and get massive
| benefits and robustness.
|
| Performance between junior basic code and heavily optimized
| complex queries even on just Oracle can be 1000x easily, just
| ask any data warehouse guy (seen it few times myself even
| though I don't do warehouses). You can maybe add another 0
| for AS-400 there in extreme cases.
|
| Yes if you end up doing things wrong and expect that CPU to
| do some heavy math then yes this will be dusted quickly.
| Otherwise, not so much.
|
| But this goes against most modern 'SV principles' so I don't
| expect much love from younger generations here. Business love
| that though, and secretly wish all IT could be as reliable
| and predictable as them although that ship has sailed long
| time ago. One of those 'they don't do them like good old
| times anymore'.
| chasil wrote:
| I am very aware that an instance of db2 is deeply embedded
| into the OS, which is designed to be easily maintained. I
| deal with one regularly at another corporate site.
|
| You might also find it interesting to consider that the CPU
| was likely made by Global Foundries (assuming that their
| arrangement with IBM is still in place).
|
| I am still trying to get my coworkers excited about VMS on
| x86; our VAX users are completely disinterested.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| You have VAX users?
| chasil wrote:
| VMS 7.3.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| Are they still actually running on VAX, or something more
| "modern" like Alpha?
| chasil wrote:
| We are using the Charon VAX emulator on an HPE Xeon.
|
| I have my own skunkworks VMS 1.0 on SimH, from these
| instructions:
|
| https://gunkies.org/wiki/Installing_VMS_V1.0_on_SIMH
| sgt wrote:
| Who is using VMS in 2024? Use case?
| chasil wrote:
| An enormous set of COBOL applications using TDMS.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I love their design architecture, a full OS being bytecode
| based besides the kernel infrastructures since 1988, while
| we keep getting from those SV principles how WASM is going
| to change the world.
| KMag wrote:
| ... and AoT-compiled at installation time! We didn't get
| this in mainstream software until Android Runtime started
| AoT-compiling Dalvik bytecode. As I've mentioned
| elsewhere, Android Runtime shows that AoT compilation
| doesn't prevent you from dynamically re-optimizing your
| binaries based on profiling feedback.
| pjmlp wrote:
| We kind of did in Windows/.NET with NGEN, and Windows
| Phone 8.x and 10, before Android started doing it.
|
| Naturally NGEN has the caveat of only being good enough
| for faster startup, and requiring strong binaries (aka
| signed dlls), which meant not everyone adopted it.
|
| Windows 8.x adopted Bartok from Singularity, where
| applications would be precompiled on the store, and
| linked on device at instalation time.
|
| Windows 10 moved full AOT compilation into the store when
| downloading into specific devices.
|
| Note that full AOT on Android is only on versions 5 and
| 6, starting with version 7 onwards is a mix of
| interpretation, JIT and AOT, which is nonetheless quite
| cool.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I came into contact with z/OS, VSAM and the likes, but I
| couldn't see how they did relational queries (joins), all I
| remember is that every file is row based structured columns
| that doesn't require parsing (and language integrated in
| the case of COBOL). What am I missing ?
| tolle wrote:
| z/OS is their mainframe OS. The AS/400 is something
| different. Different hardware and different software.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| The OS/400 operating system ran on AS/400 computers. The
| successor to OS/400 is the _i_ system:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_i
| lobochrome wrote:
| I was part of the project that moved Nintendo's inventory
| management system from as/400 to SAP HANA in 2015.
|
| We had massive queries that ran in seconds that HANA with
| millions blown into the consultants just couldn't complete
| in time (nightly billing runs).
|
| The solution in the end was that a lot of complexity and
| decades of cleverness in adjusting to specific patterns in
| customer behavior were thrown out and replaced by "the
| consultant will just adjust that every week by hand".
|
| Also - I was soooo much faster with a num pad and the
| terminal than clicking around the SAP GUI. Ultimately part
| of why I left there.
| chasd00 wrote:
| Iirc as400 hardware and OS was optimized for IO
| throughout and batch processing. What was the hardware
| SAP HANA was being deployed on?
|
| /no experience with SAP but I've never heard a successful
| story implementing it ever
| hef19898 wrote:
| Because you only hear of the failures. Viaot the SAP
| homepage to get an idea of who is using it, all of those
| companies implemented it auccessfully at one point.
|
| OP isn't saying the SAP implementation wasn't successful
| so, just expensive (no surprise), and somethings didn't
| work as begore (no surprise neither).
| patja wrote:
| Microsoft completed a very successful SAP implementation,
| on SQL Server and Windows. After two failed attempts. I
| am probably one of the few people who worked on all 3
| tries. And prior to that they had a few AS400s running
| the business.
| steve1977 wrote:
| Buuuut HANA is an in-memory DB and the best thing ever
| since integrated circuits were invented! (if I was to
| believe Hasso Plattner)
| sillywalk wrote:
| POWER 10 is on 7nm.
|
| It also has a ton of RAS features.[0]
|
| ECC beyond SECDED, processor instruction retry, CRC on all
| fabrics part of which can fail and the system will degrade to
| half-bandwidth. Hot/Swap and/or Redudant everything to
| include the LCD panel on the OP Panel.
|
| I'm actually curious what type of RAS stuff EPYC and XEON
| have, and hope somebody can link to the info.
|
| [0] https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/2RJYYJML
| senectus1 wrote:
| totally agree, we had one at the minesite I was admin at. Ran
| JD.Edwards ERP on it. was rock. solid. in a time when NT4 was
| king.
|
| Also had a Domino mail server (for lotus notes. It was way
| ahead of its time (at the time) and also super rock solid.
| Neither ever gave me any trouble... even when the Domino server
| ran out of disk space.. it never died or corrupted. just let me
| know and when i fixed it it carried on like there was no issue.
| elorant wrote:
| It surely worked, but when it didn't it took ages to resolve
| the issue. I remember back in mid nineties, IBM had brought a
| whole team to troubleshoot an issue and they stayed at the
| company where I worked for almost a week to find out what went
| wrong.
| Pamar wrote:
| Well, exactly the same thing happened in a project I worked
| on in mid-2000s.
|
| Except it was not AS400 or anything hardware... it was a
| problem with an Oracle product, and took a bit over one week
| with higher and higher gurus being parachuted in by Oracle
| Europe.
|
| And in the early 90s I had another similar episode, this time
| with DEC/Vax. Not sure anymore but I think they finally had
| to patch the OS.
|
| My point: nothing made by humans can guarantee 101% uptime.
| The main difference is how far any vendor will go to solve
| your problems.
| kragen wrote:
| i would say, rather, that the main difference is how
| dependent you are on the goodwill of the vendor to solve
| your problems, and how much you can solve yourself (or by
| hiring people). which is why oracle has been mostly
| replaced with postgres, mysql, and sqlite; why as/400 has
| been mostly replaced with web servers running apache and
| nginx; why vaxen and the like have been mostly replaced
| with i386 and later amd64 hardware with buses like pci and
| pcie; and why vax/vms has been replaced by linux
|
| when you have business-critical systems problems only your
| systems vendor can solve, over time, their pricing strategy
| tends to converge on the following:
|
| 1. how much money does your company make?
|
| 2. hand it over.
|
| you may not know as much about linux as the gurus dec
| parachuted in to patch your vms installation knew about
| vms, but i can guarantee that you care more about your own
| problems than dec did, and that counts for more. you can
| either learn what you need to know or, if you have more
| money than time, hire somebody who already knows it--at a
| market rate, not a monopoly-rents rate. the perverse
| incentives enjoyed by vendors of closed systems slowly but
| surely destroyed almost all of them, leaving only a few
| standing
| Pamar wrote:
| I am not sure of what point you are trying to make here.
|
| I have been in the industry since late 80s and (surely
| due to the kind of customers I worked with, so I am not
| implying that this applies to everyone and everywhere)
| and I have never seen anything even remotely "mission-
| critical" replacing Oracle or Microsoft stacks with
| Linux/Postgres.
|
| I am currently working on something based on ridiculously
| obsolete technology (Progress) which is running on
| Solaris, for example. The company I am working with is
| concerned about the chance that Progress will just die,
| but replacing it with Postgres is the least of our
| problems. The real problem is that a full rewrite would
| take maybe 5 years and nobody wants to start the ball
| rolling.
|
| In the meantime, we are "more than happy" to pay whatever
| the licensing is both for Progress and Oracle (for
| Solaris) and having them "on call" in case something
| breaks.
| kragen wrote:
| i am sorry that my comment was unclear, and i would be
| happy to explain whatever it is that you are having
| trouble understanding
|
| > _I have never seen anything even remotely "mission-
| critical" replacing Oracle or Microsoft stacks with
| Linux/Postgres_
|
| yeah, this only rarely happens inside a single company.
| mostly the way this works is that companies that run
| their mission-critical systems on oracle and microsoft
| stacks get outcompeted in the market by companies running
| on linux and postgres, because they can solve their own
| problems instead of letting their vendors decide which
| problems are worth solving and what their profit margins
| should be allowed to be
|
| you have, i am sure, noticed that many more companies
| today run their mission-critical systems on linux than on
| solaris, though microsoft is still in the running and
| even in the lead in some areas
| Pamar wrote:
| Maybe the problem is that the company or companies you
| have in mind operate mostly in the service business and
| are relative recent - i.e. dating back to the 90s at most
| (e.g. AirBnb).
|
| I sincerely doubt that for automotive/manufacturing,
| utilities or travel (the three industries I have most
| experience with) linux (or any specific IT technology)
| has ever made the difference between surviving and being
| eaten alive by competitors.
|
| In that universe IT services are a commodity. Just like
| Electrical Power: you cannot operate an automotice
| company without electrical power, but buying it from
| Utility Company A instead of Utility Company B does not
| matter at all.
|
| For sure when an entire industry adopts a completely new
| technology (e.g.: IOT Shipping) they will go for whatever
| seems to provide the best solution for their specific
| case. But their bread and butter stuff (ERP, CRM,
| Finance...) will either be some custom legacy app (or
| more probably a hodge-podge of balkanized legacy apps) or
| will be some customized behemoth like SAP, Oracle
| Finance, Microsoft Dynamics.
|
| Both SAP and Oracle products can run on Linux, granted.
| But in that case I think it will be a vendor-backed
| version of Linux, so the support will come from the same
| entity that provided the application stack.
| kragen wrote:
| it'll be interesting to see what happens, but my
| perspective is pretty different from yours, which is
| surprising to me since we're talking about an area you
| have intimate and deep knowledge of. i'll explain my
| perspective here, in the knowledge that probably the
| reason for our disagreement is largely things you do know
| and i don't, so i fully expect this to make me look very
| foolish. hopefully you'll be kind enough to correct my
| ignorance, impressive though it may be
|
| information technology is pretty important to travel and
| to logistics in general. remember that ibm tpf was
| originally the 'airline control program', and before
| that, sabre, developed in collaboration with aa. and
| travel and logistics planning are of course among the
| most economically significant uses of mixed integer
| linear programming.
|
| the key question is, i think, whether operational
| excellence in it operations is an economically
| significant competitive advantage. will customers switch
| airlines (or hotel chains, or car rental companies, or
| travel agencies) because of corporate incompetence at
| operating their data centers? how would they even know if
| their airline or hotel chain or travel agency sucks at
| resolving operational problems, has colossal security
| breaches due to utter incompetence, and struggles to roll
| out new it-enabled features?
|
| well, we can start with travel agencies. most travel
| agencies have already gone out of business. orbitz,
| expedia, and hipmunk ate their lunch. priceline came in
| and obliterated the discount special ticket market,
| growing into booking.com. all of these so-called online
| travel agencies live and die by their computer systems,
| and large parts of their workforce consist of programmers
|
| how about airlines?
|
| in 02016 delta had to cancel half their flights one day
| because of it incompetence:
| https://www.cbsnews.com/news/outage-causes-massive-
| delays-ca...
|
| aa (remember, the company for which modern transaction
| processing was developed) had a half-hour-long nationwide
| outage in 02018 due to it incompetence:
| https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/29/american-airlines-
| flights-de...
|
| twice in 02022, british airways had a not-quite-
| systemwide outage due to it incompetence:
| https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/british-
| airways-i... and most ominously the reporting included
| the phrase, 'BA has a long history of outages that have
| impacted passengers.'
|
| also in 02022, westjet had a systemwide outage due to it
| incompetence: https://simpleflying.com/westjet-suffers-
| major-system-outage...
|
| and most famously, in 02022, southwest had an enormous
| systemwide outage over the christmas holidays that led
| them to cancel 16700 flights and cost it a billion
| dollars: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-
| defense/southwest...
|
| and this doesn't affect competition much, but the usa as
| a whole had an hour-and-a-half outage due to it
| incompetence in january of last year: https://www.dallasn
| ews.com/business/airlines/2023/01/11/wide...
|
| later last year, spirit airlines had a systemwide outage:
| https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12148955/Spirit-
| Air...
|
| and so did southwest, again:
| https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-
| defense/southwest...
|
| mckinsey has a list of recent airline problems due to it
| incompetence that have affected customers, including in
| some cases not only delayed flights but leaks of private
| data customers are legally required to provide to
| airlines: https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Indus
| tries/Travel%... (but unfortunately they have carefully
| purged it of details that would make each case
| independently verifiable)
|
| so i would say that specifically in the case of travel,
| incompetence at information technology operations is a
| significant public relations problem already; it
| regularly makes national and world news. and we should
| expect this to get much worse before it gets better.
| today the saving grace is that no airline currently has
| reasonably competent information technology operations,
| so there's no competitor eating southwest's lunch. but
| when your incompetence at running your computer systems
| loses you a billion dollars here and a billion dollars
| there, sooner or later it starts to add up to real money
|
| with respect to manufacturing, i think it's well known
| that jit supply chain management is extremely demanding
| on it operations, and since covid began, supply-chain
| disruption has been an enormous stress on the
| profitability of manufacturing operations--in particular,
| in the automotive sector
|
| more broadly, though, increasing automation of
| manufacturing is a crucial competitive advantage; to take
| one example, today jlcpcb or pcbway will sell you custom
| pcb manufacturing services for fifty dollars (or two
| dollars as a promotional offer) that would cost you a
| thousand dollars and up from flextronics. and now they're
| moving into cnc machining, as well, and of course service
| bureaus like shapeways have been around for a while,
| gradually moving up the value chain. all of this is
| crucially dependent on the operational stability of their
| web sites and their resistance to data breaches and
| ransomware, but so far they're doing a lot better than
| the airlines
|
| this is not just a big challenge for traditional job
| shops, who are at risk of being ghettoized into a
| constantly shrinking super-premium market as disruptive
| innovation eats them from below; it's also a huge
| opportunity for new kinds of products that depend on the
| low-cost availability of such highly automated custom
| manufacturing for their profitability
|
| in a related development, many high-value, highly complex
| products manufactured using traditional techniques--most
| obviously mechanical wristwatches, cameras, and various
| kinds of on-orbit systems, but also timers, governors,
| carburetors, power transmission systems, internal
| combustion engines, and now even lightswitches and
| lightbulbs--are being replaced by mechanically much
| simpler systems which instead rely heavily on embedded
| software and, in some cases, centralized cloud services
| and much more highly automated manufacturing
|
| having your car start reliably, and your steering and
| braking systems work reliably, and being able to turn on
| the heater without taking your eyes off the road, hasn't
| been much of a competitive advantage for decades; but, as
| much of the unreliability of those systems starts to stem
| from software incompetence instead of incompetence at
| hydraulics and gears, we should start to see automotive
| suppliers competing not just on how efficient their
| inventory management is but on how reliable and
| featureful and usable their firmware is. at the most
| prosaic level, if the bluetooth audio only works half the
| time you get into your friend's chevrolet, you're more
| likely to buy a hyundai
|
| utilities, though, i agree. that's because utilities are
| regulated monopolies, so it doesn't matter how
| incompetent they are; relatively few companies and fewer
| people are going to move out of texas because ercot and
| its member utilities can't mitigate even the most glaring
| risks to system stability. pg&e might be an exception,
| because its sky-high energy prices are making california
| heavy industry as a whole economically uncompetitive on
| the world scene, but pg&e isn't going to go bankrupt; its
| customers are
|
| fundamentally, though, in the 20th century companies were
| operated by managers, and in the 21st century,
| increasingly, they are operated by computers--as are
| physical products. outsourcing your computing makes as
| much sense as outsourcing your management
| Pamar wrote:
| You make a long list of things that you probably had to
| google on, but you still seem to lack any actual, hands-
| on experience on how things actually work and mostly
| important why systems like SABRE take forever to be
| replaced. Trust me: it was not because of Linux or the
| lack of it.
|
| Most importantly, though, you keep missing the forest for
| the three: yes, modern cars have more and more
| electronics in them, and this most probably runs on
| customized, hardened Linux or some other modern OS. And
| they need constant communication with cloud based
| services etc. etc. This applies also to fridges, TVs and
| so on.
|
| My point is that IN ORDER TO PRODUCE THE CAR, FRIDGE OR
| TV manufacturing industry still uses for the most part
| legacy systems and that the cost to replace these with
| newly developed applications (that for some reason are
| either available only on Linux or "work better" on Linux)
| is never been appealing enough to justify the switchover.
|
| [also, please stop quoting buzzwords at me: "JIT supply
| chain management" is what I was working on when I
| encountered the aforementioned problem on DEX/VAX. The
| application was written in COBOL, but was the first
| project where we adopted Oracle (Version 6 I believe)
| instead of a Hierarchical DBMS. The year was 1991 or
| 1992, and the company I was working for was definitely a
| late adopter].
|
| When companies producing TVs switched to more modern,
| larger screens (let's say LCD/LED)... they just changed
| the BOM of the new models in their own heavily customized
| SAP instance. Maybe they had to add a couple of fields to
| a table because of new characteristics they needed to
| track and that were not present on older models. They
| probably revamped their production lines, for sure. They
| had to hire younger engineers to develop or productivize
| (sp?) these new technologies. This still did not make a
| dent in the large pile of legacy code that was used to
| manage the company as a whole.
|
| Even when the PRODUCT is totally, radically new, the
| systems that manage its production (and sale, and post
| sale support) do not need to follow suit. You still need
| to order components to suppliers, schedule the
| production, deliver the completed product to the customer
| or to the reseller, possibly keep track of where
| something was sold/sent in case they need to recall some
| faulty batch or police needs to know about it (a common
| requirements for vehicles, for example).
|
| The only exceptions to this simple rule are companies
| like Tesla, i.e. someone who creates a completely new
| manufacturing company from scratch. Of course, these are
| outliers, but they are also the only ones that don't
| already have an enormous amount of resources invested in
| systems created 25+ years ago.
|
| The other exceptions, of course, are companies who do not
| produce or handle anything physical (remember when I
| mentioned Airbnb?). These, too, can start from scratch,
| and maybe for these the technology makes a difference. On
| the other hand, a startup cannot really afford to pay the
| exorbitant fees requested by Oracle, and they find it
| much more convenient using Postgres or any other Open
| Source product.
|
| More power to them. All this does not change my original
| viewpoint:
|
| IT for mature companies is exactly like any other
| utility. If you need fuel for your steel mill furnace,
| changing provider every 3 months might help you save a
| few thousands bucks (because you use so much of the stuff
| that even a sub-cent decrease in price will be
| noticeable) ... but by doing so you will probably have to
| pay 10 times that just guarantee that the switchover to
| the new supplier goes on without any glitch (like having
| your gas supply cut off one day or two before the new one
| starts working). If you need electrical power you may
| consider to put solar panels on the roof of your
| plants... just like you may want to put a REST interface
| in front of some of your stored procedures. But you will
| still depend on the power company for 99% of your energy,
| and you will still have to mantain your stored procedure
| because if you need to change something there, no amount
| of JSON will solve the problem.
|
| This is the gist of my argument, if it still sounds
| unconvincing to you it may just be because I worked most
| of my career server side as a system integration expert
| for large, mature companies. Maybe you have a different
| background - companies established _after_ the web was
| born are surely a completely different beast, and my
| experience most probably would not apply, but as long as
| we are talking of anything founded before 1990 I am
| pretty sure that inertia is the prevalent force that
| shaped their IT landscape.
| dmix wrote:
| > it was a problem with an Oracle product, and took a bit
| over one week with higher and higher gurus being parachuted
| in by Oracle Europe.
|
| From my understanding that was basically Oracle's business
| model back in the day (or the model of a lot of employees).
| Extensive consultant billable hours for maintenance and
| integration after you buy it.
| elorant wrote:
| _My point: nothing made by humans can guarantee 101%
| uptime. The main difference is how far any vendor will go
| to solve your problems._
|
| From my experience, IBM will go to the far side of the moon
| and back in order to solve your problem. It will probably
| cost you in fees as much as buying a new car, but there's
| no luck of resources or resilience from their part. And I
| admire them for that. As much as we like to idolize the
| latest and greatest in this forum, the truth is that when
| it comes to mission critical equipment you need someone
| that you know will fly an expert from a different country
| in the middle of the night if they have to.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| I never saw that anywhere I was, but every system will have
| its share of issues for sure.
|
| Something similar happened to a client a couple of years ago.
| They wanted to set up their "devops pipeline" on AWS.
|
| First they tried to solve it in house. After two months they
| gave up and brought in an AWS specialist. After two weeks, we
| had two more AWS specialist inclduing one really expensive.
| 1.5 months later we had the pipeline going, but fragile as
| hell.
|
| I have not been able to piece together how it could have
| possibly taken so long. I didn not work on this part of the
| project myself at all.
|
| Given that the entire back-edn was in C#, with VSProject
| configurations the whole bit, it would have taken less than
| week on Azure, if you kept some of the presets.
|
| But yeah Azure CI/CD can suck as well and its less
| configurable. Which is a curse or a benefit depending on your
| standpoint.
| HankB99 wrote:
| > There were some drawbacks, but Id love to have one to play
| with.
|
| One of the shops I worked at had an AS/400 and related
| equipment sitting on a pallet by the elevator bank. I could
| have had it for free.
|
| Drawbacks? I had no way to transport a pallet of computer
| equipment. And IIRC it required 3 phase power so care and
| feeding would have been well beyond my means. (But I still have
| and occasionally use the IBM Model M that they were going to
| discard and another time I carried a retired Sun pizza box home
| on the train.)
| bongodongobob wrote:
| As someone who works heavily in infra, months of uptime is
| absolutely the norm. If you find yourself having to reboot
| servers or they are crashing, you're doing something wrong.
| Suppafly wrote:
| ...or they are microsoft servers and you have to reboot them
| once a month to apply security updates still for some reason.
| randrus wrote:
| In the 90s I worked across the aisle from our AS/400 dev -
| after an office power outage we'd spend hours running fsck on
| our unixen and he'd take a long lunch. Every time.
| safeimp wrote:
| > IF something did go wrong, they would at times call IBM and
| ask for service before the customer had any knowledge of an
| issue.
|
| I always assumed their call home service was triggered by SNMP
| but may be wrong? Regardless, IBM exposed a lot of metrics via
| SNMP so it was always an easy way to query it for metrics
| and/or accept traps from their devices/OS's for failures
| tm11zz wrote:
| Clearly this is another example of Sora in action
| ed_mercer wrote:
| I wonder what the prompt was!
| bank_daddy wrote:
| I supported core banking software and did some RPG II development
| on the AS/400 in the early 1990s. That system lives on in banking
| and has since been rebranded to iSeries and then Power (and the
| OS/400 operating system rebranded to "i").
|
| Chances are if you bank in a community or regional bank, the core
| banking software is run on Power hardware. Long live the AS/400!
| sakopov wrote:
| Yep, Banks and insurance companies love AS/400.
| Zobat wrote:
| > No social distancing in 1993.
|
| No gender diversity either, though clearly not all middle aged
| white dudes.
|
| His daughter seeing this and wondering who that was, those things
| hurt.
| Koshkin wrote:
| For those who would like to experience an AS/400:
|
| https://pub400.com/
| WorksOfBarry wrote:
| combine that with [1] and you're set for development
|
| https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=HalcyonT...
| rootusrootus wrote:
| If you're really into it, there are usually a few on eBay. A
| few years back I almost picked one up for my dad as a fun gift;
| he worked for IBM for 25 years and much of the later years were
| focused on the AS/400. He spoke quite fondly of it.
| nxobject wrote:
| I wonder what the licensing situation would be - especially
| if they'd wiped the disk. Although I'm now tempted to look
| that up...
| sillywalk wrote:
| Here's a deep dive book on the architecture of the AS/400 up to
| the PowerPC port, written by Frank Soltis, one of the main
| people behind the system.
|
| https://archive.org/details/insideas4000000solt
| ljoshua wrote:
| What I find most interesting from this clip is that, if you just
| swapped out some of the product names and acronyms, it would
| largely sound like a technical presentation that could be given
| today. "Here's a database, we want to connect it with SQL to
| another product for visualizing the data, and we're going to add
| some automation to take care of business process X."
|
| Surely things have gotten faster and (in some cases!) more
| efficient, but we are doing the same thing 30 years later that we
| were excited about in 1993. In a way that's both comforting and
| darkly funny.
| duxup wrote:
| Choosing software, prioritizing the right things, and
| connecting it all is hard. We're not good at it and we have to
| re-connect the dots every-time we shuffle the deck chairs.
|
| I think I've worked on the problem of "we want our sales guys
| to get an email whenever the sale they made ships" ... an un-
| countable amount of times. Without fail the first and biggest
| hurdle is that the customer does not reliably capture or
| connect their sales people's email addresses in any kind of
| reliable way. I'm sure they do when it comes to paying bonuses,
| but not for sending the email when the thing ships. It makes no
| sense, it should be easy, but they don't. So we work on it on
| and on and then with the next customer and so on.
|
| And honestly I'm not sure any of these sales folks read the
| dang email.
| StevePerkins wrote:
| The Mother of All Demos was given in 1968, and still warrants
| its moniker today.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
| mdgrech23 wrote:
| I work in the auto industry. Cars have changed so much but at
| the end of the day they're still just internal combustion
| engines that spin wheels. I suppose EVs represent true
| innovation but I'm still dubious on their future.
| lizknope wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Type_51
|
| > The 1916 Type 53 was the first car to use the same control
| layout as modern automobiles- with the gear lever and hand
| brake in the middle of the front two seats, a key started
| ignition, and three pedals for the clutch, brake and throttle
| in the modern order.
|
| I've seen a clip on Top Gear where they drove some early cars
| and the controls were completely different like levers for
| acceleration and braking.
|
| How long would it take someone familiar with this 108 year
| old Cadillac to learn how to drive a modern car from point A
| to point B? 1 minute?
| pavlov wrote:
| Driving a Tesla is much easier than driving the 1916
| Cadillac. The biggest surprise to this ancient driver would
| be the aggressive regenerative braking.
| Max-q wrote:
| Now that internal combustion powered cars are down to less
| than 20% of new car sales in quite some countries, and has
| been for several years, I think we can safely say that the EV
| is not a fad and that the fossil technology is going the same
| way as the steam engine in the 60s. The modern electric motor
| is a superior technology in almost any way. The battery,
| however, is just good enough, and for the replacement to be
| complete, better battery technology will be needed. For those
| last 15-20%, the energy density of Li-Ion is just not good
| enough.
| douglasisshiny wrote:
| Why are you dubious about the future of EVs?
| eitally wrote:
| Honestly, the world was simpler then (with fewer layers of
| abstraction separating the database from the presentation) and
| I suspect the majority of the time it was far more efficient
| then than now.
|
| ... speaking as someone who was in the job of enterprise BI
| where data sources were primarily Progress databases on AS400,
| back from around 2000-2010, when we finally migrated to a Linux
| / PostgreSQL stack.
| sillywalk wrote:
| Out of curiosity, why weren't you using the built-in DB2 on
| AS400?
| asveikau wrote:
| The fact that this is server side and data storage probably
| contributes to this. Consumer grade client devices in 1993 were
| large and bulky, didn't even do multitasking or memory
| protection very well. Now they're cheap, small, ubiquitous,
| have lots of very high level programming interfaces.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| Dang I was not that smart when I was 26.
| tohnjitor wrote:
| AS/400 is an awesome system.
| thehias wrote:
| Nice, I still do that in 2024!
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| Single color polo, white undershirt, khaki pants, leather walking
| shoes. It was the same at a lot of tech places throughout the 90s
| and I remember it well. I'm not sure how that style started or
| where, it might have come out of Microsoft and Seattle.
| steve1977 wrote:
| Lol when I read the headline I was thinking "oh my this makes me
| remember Microsoft SNA Server" and sure enough that's what they
| were using...
| tiahura wrote:
| Total sidebar, but am I the only one who thinks his accent sounds
| odd?
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| He sounds australian
| swozey wrote:
| I'm always so impressed with how long MS is able to keep
| employees. I see so many 10-20+ year vets. I know a ton of people
| who have left and gone back as well.
|
| I think it's a very millennial thing but I've barely gone past 3
| years somewhere. Half our careers our salaries were controlled by
| 2008 and you had to job hop to get more money.
| anshubansal2000 wrote:
| He had hair :)
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| The program he uses as an ODBC tool to access the mainframe
| (StarSQL for Windows) still exists and as of 2020 even got an
| update [1]
|
| [1] https://docs.stelodata.com/Products/starsql/readme.html
| schoen wrote:
| I had a summer internship in high school with an AS/400
| application development shop. I found the machine and its
| development environment annoying and unpleasant compared to Unix,
| but the support from IBM was incredible. Absurdly bureaucratic,
| but also so thorough and detailed and accessible.
|
| I still have this memory that IBM sent out an Engineering Change
| for the AS/400 that consisted of a twist tie to help customers
| who had purchased an Ethernet card for it coil their Ethernet
| cables more reliably. (The twist tie of course then having a
| specific IBM part number.) I would love to be able to
| substantiate this memory.
|
| IBM was also seemingly very open to supporting new technologies,
| both hardware and software, on the AS/400, including some that
| were invented decades after the machine was introduced. Usually
| for a fee, of course!
| easton wrote:
| IBM lists a cable tie as a part for Power5 here:
| https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/power5?topic=catalog-system-part...
|
| I don't know if 9119-590 is compatible with AS/400 though.
| neilv wrote:
| That twist-tie ECO process sounds aerospace-grade.
|
| I saw things like that from IBM, just from their later Power
| AIX workstations.
|
| For mission-critical computing companies, there was lots of
| process intended not to have _anything_ slip through the
| cracks.
|
| The first memory that comes to mind was actually DEC (or was it
| HP?), who, to send a single sheet of paper (e.g., for a license
| key), would routinely use an entire shipping box. Paper would
| be shrink-wrapped or poly-bagged, with a sheet of cardboard.
| Plus a packing list, itemizing not only that one sheet of
| paper, but also itemizing all the shipping supplies to be used.
|
| Not very efficient in some sense, but if it avoided a single
| mission-critical incident for a customer, I suppose it was
| worthwhile.
| barbazoo wrote:
| I've never worked directly with an AS/400. I do remember doing a
| school internship when I was 15 or so with our town's local IT
| shop and we went to a customer once and replaced the backup
| tapes. Still stuck in my head as something that was impressive at
| the time.
| t312227 wrote:
| hello,
|
| in the 1980ties my system "of choice" was an atari st and my
| schools computer was a VAX 11/730 running VMS 4.x ... later 2 of
| them in a DECnet - had some fun with them :))
|
| but a friend of mine was an admin for an IBM AS400 and out of
| curiosity i visited him from time to time and "looked him over
| his shoulder" as we say in german during updates and similar
| tasks ...
|
| was a nice and very stable system back then ...
|
| it had a small hdd - can't remeber its size - and the updates
| came on floppies with 8 inches if i remember it correctly ... 4
| or 5 of them at a time - around 120 k each ... laughable by
| today's standards, but afaik pretty common for a small to medium
| sized business back then - a travel agency.
|
| cheers v.
| lvl102 wrote:
| I hate Microsoft but I respect Satya so much for what he
| accomplished.
| jasoneckert wrote:
| Microsoft had a lot of AS/400s when I worked there in 1993. I
| believe most of the core infrastructure ran on it.
|
| On my last day there before returning to Canada in August 1993, I
| vividly remember that Bill Gates had a general meeting where he
| was talking about how IBM was doing poorly and that he was
| thinking of buying it, but not the whole company, just the AS/400
| division (obviously, that didn't happen).
| internet101010 wrote:
| I use AS/400 in 2024, though not that much anymore because we
| only have a few things left in there that haven't been migrated.
| What we have gone to is less reliable and getting data out of it
| is always a herculean effort that requires a bunch of service
| tickets and meetings.
|
| One of the great features of AS/400 is I think shift+esc, which
| allows you to quickly view the list of tables (or files as they
| call them) that are being used to populate the current screen.
| This should be a standard function for Tableau/Power BI workbooks
| that have live database connections.
|
| I have a love-hate relationship with it. It's like an old pickup
| with 1M miles that refuses to die.
| ako wrote:
| How do you use that info? Validate that it's using the correct
| data, or as info when writing a new app? I often wished I had
| the same when building something on top of sap/salesforce/any
| other app that would show the source of every field on a page,
| ideally also showing the api that would give that data.
| internet101010 wrote:
| When people say "I want the <insert metric> from G42" with
| G42 being a certain screen, it's helpful to be able to
| quickly see what all is populating that screen. It's not
| exact but over the course of 30 years a lot of tables can get
| created and 7-8 character limits on table and field names
| doesn't help.
|
| I am not sure if it is a requirement when creating a table to
| have descriptions but they are all there in my org. So go to
| the screen to get the tables and then join it with a "give me
| the list of all tables, table descriptions, columns, column
| descriptions" SQL query. EZ.
|
| After seeing how useful these descriptions are, I firmly
| believe that every organization should make them a
| requirement even if the rdb itself does not. Just simple form
| of documentation at time of creation that allows for context
| while still giving you the ability to enforce rigid naming
| structures.
| KMag wrote:
| I was surprised Sun/Oracle's JVM (or Apple, after their 3rd
| architecture migration) never took a page from AS/400's TIMI
| (Technology Independent Machine Interface) and compile an
| architecture-independent representation to native code at
| installation time.
|
| As the Android Runtime later demonstrated, nothing prevents you
| from distributing an architecture-independent representation,
| AoT-compiling to native code at installation time, instrumenting
| the native code, and then re-optimizing at runtime and/or in a
| background batch process if your instrumentation statistics
| deviate substantially from what was available the last time you
| re-optimized.
|
| Apart from the extra disk space for both bytecode and native
| representations, something like TIMI allows for the best of both
| worlds as far as AoT and JIT. (It's also nice that TIMI doesn't
| require a garbage collector to be running.)
|
| I'm not aware of modern AS/400 dynamically re-optimizing
| binaries, but doing so wouldn't break anything. Given the
| conservative nature of mainframe users, I imagine dynamic re-
| compilation would need to be an opt-in feature.
| cedws wrote:
| Wow, really unique accent he had back then. It's like a mix of
| British and American with a slight bit of Indian.
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