Getting an IBM AS/400 Midrange Computer on the Internet

A little backstory: I was taking classes at Brunswick Community College, working on an A.S. in Computer Programming. I knew the instructor who taught a lot of the programming classes, because I'd had him as an instructor on my previous go-round at BCC, when I took a couple of programming classes as electives.

Anyway, I signed up for a class titled something like "Survey of Operating Systems", where I had presumed I'd learn all about Windows, and maybe some kind of Unix (this was about 1996, so Linux wasn't ubiquitous yet). So I show up for the first day of class, and the instructor was like "Oh, Phil, I have something for you."

He proceeds to point me to a room with a huge behemoth of a machine, which appears to be some kind of computer, along with several boxes of tape reels, and a stack of bound manuals about as tall as myself. "Install the OS on that AS/400, and get it running and connected to the Internet, and you're done for the semester with an 'A'", he tells me.

It took a while... I mean, I was still pretty green in those days, and I'd never touched an AS/400 before. But with lots of trial and error, digging through manuals, and blood, sweat, and tears, I managed it. I guess he was impressed, and took a special interest in helping me find a job, as a little later he referred me to what would become my first job in the IT industry - as an AS/400 operator / Netware administrator for a little scientific glassware manufacturer in Wilmington.

There was no programming involved, but it paid better than working as a parts clerk at Advance Auto Parts, and I got to gasp work with computers professionally! Hey, that was a big deal for this young kid in 1996. Even better, it was an evening shift job, so I could still go to school by day, and then work at night.

I wound up spending a couple of years doing a lot of AS/400 related work while I was working my way through college. Never did any programming on them professionally though, even though I took two semesters of RPG programming in college.

Note: if you're wondering... the machine I had to work with was MUCH larger than the one in the story linked here. I'm not sure what the vintage of the thing was, but it was old enough that some company had decommissioned it and then donated it to the college I was at. So I'm pretty sure it was several generations older than the one shown in the article.

Also of note: the machine in question supported telnet, but as the article notes, AS/400's use a 5250 terminal by default, not something like the more familiar VT-100 (or related). Of course I didn't have a 5250 terminal emulator program available, but it turns out simple telnet client was enough to at least log in, even though it was hard to do some things since the AS/400 interface is so menu and command-key driven. I don't know if tn5250 existed back then or not, but I found it and started using it at some point.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18897598

With regards to iSeries we have developers who have put in place more than a few REST services both with IBM code and Profound Logic code. IBM provides both custom web service programs (think collection of DLLs) and other simpler interfaces. The key is you can reuse a lot of existing code by putting a good web interface on the front of it and your customers would never know.

The number of large companies using the platform is quite high and includes many big names people would not expect as well as a certain major league sport. Overseas it seems more accepted to say you are on one.

Good names for iSeries development are Jon Paris and Scott Klement. See Scott's page at https://www.scottklement.com/

the standard language for coding, RPGLE has morphed through the years to where it is as free form as any other language while being 100% backwards compatible, the confusing part is you can mixed fixed format and free form stuff all at once. With ILE programming you can bind in C and JAVA too.

For the most part these hang on and get new deployment because of a combination of code that works every day and that business math while simple has to be sure. Throw in that the system is in effect a DB2 database with full support for SQL and more and its easy to see its longevity. Now if someone can convince IBM to not keep renaming it.

I had a quick search but nothing useful turned up.

We used 286 computers with windows and a terminal emulator that converted the control buttons to enter.

The server was shared with the states programmers as their test server so we had to wait our turn for compiling and running code. Could be a good 20 minutes to get the output of the program on the printer sometimes :-)

Tried getting a job as an RPG programmer in some companies in the area but all that was about to buy one ended up going with PC's instead. And the ones that had an AS/400 decommissioned it so didn't need programmers. But I did some work for the state, like fixing the y2k bug with birth year in the database :-)