[HN Gopher] Below MI - IBM i for hackers
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Below MI - IBM i for hackers
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 62 points
Date : 2024-06-30 14:43 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (silentsignal.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (silentsignal.github.io)
| rexreed wrote:
| IBM still wishes we were in the mainframe age where a single
| vendor had supreme authority and maintenance fees rule the day.
| You can say that many of today's SaaS vendors have similar sway
| in their more niche markets but none have the almost complete
| dominance of their market as did / does in some places IBM.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I believe there are API-level emulation products for AS/400 and
| its descendants. Any company wishing to migrate off these
| machines (as off mainframes) can do so, as long as they manage
| the risks of porting and reimplementing the applications.
|
| These lines are still popular because they offer something a
| rack of Dells can't - a nicely packaged solution of extremely
| reliable (and powerful, no pun intended in the case of i)
| hardware and software, exquisitely refined over many decades.
| gregw2 wrote:
| One firm I worked at still has its old "mainframe" running
| all its cobol apps... but it's all running on a windows
| server backed by a sql server database.
| rbanffy wrote:
| It's a real shame there is no IBM i emulation the same way there
| is Hercules. The very alien nature of its OS, all the way back to
| the AS/400, can be extremely educational and mind-expanding for
| people who grew up on Windows and Unix.
| sillywalk wrote:
| If only..
|
| There's Inside the AS/400[0] available on the Internet Archive,
| which is a great introduction to the system. Pub400 has free
| accounts for playing around with. But it's not the same as
| having your own system.
|
| [0] https://archive.org/details/insideas4000000solt/
|
| [1] https://www.pub400.com/
| kragen wrote:
| the ia's copy doesn't seem to be freely available, but thanks
| for the book recommendation! what's your as/400 skill level?
| sillywalk wrote:
| Huh. It was available on an hourly basis when I checked.
| There's a follow on book called Fortress Rochester: Inside
| the iSeries, that I had but gave away. It seems to be very
| expensive.
|
| My skill level is zero. :) I've read the book and know a
| bit about the system, but have never used one.
| edelsohn wrote:
| Good start a description of IBM i. The article should explain
| more about capability based systems for it to make more sense.
|
| The ABI described is the same as the AIX ABI. R1 is the stack
| pointer and R31 is the frame pointer, when needed.
| kragen wrote:
| i feel like this link would be more useful if the title said
| "as/400" somewhere in it; 'ibm i' is a cringey artifact of ibm
| pretending the as/400 is so well-known it can be identified by a
| single letter, like c
|
| the as/400 design is pretty interesting, just because it's so
| different from currently popular systems. if you're familiar with
| unix and you study vms or windows 11, you won't learn that much,
| because vms and unix are almost identical. os/400 is a much
| weirder beast, and its design doesn't just have disadvantages
| relative to more widely used system architectures, but also
| advantages--even if, in the end, the disadvantages turned out to
| be more important
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(page generated 2024-06-30 23:00 UTC)