Getting an IBM AS/400 Midrange Computer on the Internet

Going from the CP/M world of dBASEII/FoxBase and CBASIC to IBM was strange and I remember thinking, "The money's better, but I look forward to unlearning all this some day." I did, and rejoined the ASCII world with no regrets. Except the pay. Did I mention the pay?

I did manage to save my company more than a year's worth of my salary once. Telephone calls were recorded on 6250BPI mag tapes and the ITT 1210 telephone switch dumped call information to the tapes twice a second to clear the queues and protect from data loss. You could see the tapes advancing in little spurts. This resulted in a dismal blocking factor since there is a physical ~1/2" leader per block, and they were required to archive the information for several years in a fireproof vault. The vault was full of these $250 tapes and they were on the verge of building an additional vault!

One day I was puttering around and noticed that the block factor was a major problem. I wrote a simple CL command to recopy and re-block the tapes to regroup the data into blocks 10x the size. After some very careful testing (my supervisor was very dubious at first) they were able to recopy their entire archive and recover 80% of the original tapes.

I also maintain a basic IDE for writing code on this OS (replacement for SEU, which was used in the article) and IBM also supply Rational Developer for i.

- https://github.com/WorksOfBarry/ILEditor - https://www.ibm.com/uk-en/marketplace/rational-developer-for...

The OS gets one or two large patches a year, but generally not many new 'features'. I've done and still do my fair share of RPG and ILE C on this system too.

I also fondly remember that all our compiles had to be done by exiting the editing screens and separately scheduling a BATCH job for the compile, and then reading the output of the BATCH job to see if your PGM compiled successfully. If not, you'd have to read the JOB LOGS to see where you committed syntax errors. No debugging at runtime, no IDEs. You had to read your own code top to bottom, scatter a few PRINT statements around (also viewed in the JOB LOGS) to see if your PGM worked at all.

One of the many things that amazed me at that time (1997) was that AS/400 had a robust ODBC CLI for both Windows and OS/2 Warp. This allowed the pointy haired bosses to enjoy results of data warehouse projects directly from their Windows PCs using Microsoft Access (of all things). In Comic Sans fonts to boot!

EDIT: Oh, I forgot to mention - I still haven't seen documentation for systems, compilers and databases as useful, user-friendly and comprehensive as the manuals compiled, printed and bound by IBM. There was absolutely no need for Google.

I will never be ashamed of that beginning. Never.