AS/400 How does it look?

Christopher Browne cbbrowne-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
Sat Aug 23 20:18:09 UTC 2008


On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 2:42 PM, William Muriithi
<william.muriithi-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Hallo there,
>
> I happen to notice that a lot of Canadian companies uses IBM AS/400.
> However, I haven't been fortunate to come across it and I am curious
> how it look. Does it have any familiarity to Unix? What would be
> reason that make it more popular in Canada than in USA?
>
> Just curious.

AS/400 is the latest iteration of IBM's "midrange" systems:
 - System 34
 - System 36
 - System 38
 - Then came AS/400, with OS called OS/400

I'll bet that many of the apps running on AS/400 are actually from the
predecessor platforms, running in emulation mode.

This is traditionally a platform where apps are mostly in COBOL and
RPG, with BASIC and PL/1 as alternatives.  System 38 had the somewhat
unique property of having a relational database (DB2) integrated into
the OS.  (Microsoft was planning to "innovate" this in Longhorn; that
seems rather late, as IBM did this in S/38 released in 1979!)

It's sold *VERY* much as a platform for inventory and accounting
systems, which is a very different branch from where Unix started
(e.g. - research and document management).

I suspect that the reason why it's seen more in Canada than in the US
is that, as a midrange system (as distinct from IBM's mainframe line),
it was cheaper to deploy for localizing the management of "branch
plants" in Canada for organizations based out of other countries (e.g.
- US & UK).  The mainframes (e.g. - what was once S360, S370,
eventually S390, and which is presently called "zSeries") would reside
in the home countries, and cheaper "midrange" systems (S/34, S/36,
S/38, AS/400, later "iSeries") would reside at branch operations in
Canada.

That's a guess, but the once I saw S/34 was in a similar case.  I was
working on getting a paper plant in Thunder Bay moved to new
accounting software; they had been a branch plant of Abitibi Price,
and the only "local" accounting was on a S/34-based system called
ShawWare.  I'm pretty sure Abitibi-Price was on IBM mainframes.

There is *now* a Unix emulation layer in OS/400, but that's an add-on
to support systems integration (e.g. - to let you get data on and off
of it) as opposed to being a way you'd build apps natively for it.
The hardware has historically been exceedingly proprietary (in ways
that used to cause people to consider IBM "evil" in the sorts of ways
that they don't like Microsoft, today).

There are interesting aspects (in a "CS geek" sense) to S/38 and
AS/400, but they're not likely to be too visible to typical users of
the platforms.
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