[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)
 
web link (www.youtube.com)
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)