AS 400 is still going strong for many companies!
Indeed. A lot of banks overhauled their core banking platforms to run on IBM i in the early to mid 90ies. It scales well and considered secure.
What have we lost? [video]
51–60 of 86 posts
Re: What have we lost? [video]
#52AS 400 is still going strong for many companies!
Indeed. A lot of banks overhauled their core banking platforms to run on IBM i in the early to mid 90ies. It scales well and considered secure.
I’m curious about the IBM i. Anyone here who can comment on how to get started? You can’t exactly buy one of these systems off the shelf.
Re: What have we lost? [video]
#53AS 400 is still going strong for many companies!
Am in my first IBMi class literally right now. It seems completely different than the Windows/Linux systems I've used for the last 25 years.
There are techs from 2 other companies in attendance. Apparently IBMi is used widely in banking.
It was the only thing NOT totaled when we got hit with ransomware, and is what holds our PII for our clients/workers.
Re: What have we lost? [video]
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. A lot of banks overhauled their core banking platforms to run on IBM i in the early to mid 90ies. It scales well and considered secure.
I’m curious about the IBM i. Anyone here who can comment on how to get started? You can’t exactly buy one of these systems off the shelf.
Get in touch with a 3rd party vendor. They can offer classes/training or point you to someone who can.
You could also take a look at IBM's redbooks. They're guides written by 3rd parties. http://redbooks.ibm.com/
And here are the IBM technical docs: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en
You can get used IBM Power servers on ebay, but they're pretty pricey. Not sure about licensing and such also, so you should look into that before buying.
Re: What have we lost? [video]
#55Seems like IBM's problem with iSeries is that they aren't encouraging new usage. They aren't working with universities to offer students any kind of courses, and don't seem to care whether or not the system is adopted. Not sure how sustainable it is, even considering the positive qualities of the system (security and simplicity of command structure, for example).
Re: What have we lost? [video]
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
We lost the environment where the whole OS was a debugger, and everything could be inspected and modified as the system was running.
Except, that’s what the browser is, and increasingly that’s where software lives.
The browser is only half (the client-facing side) of the equation.
Re: What have we lost? [video]
#57Did we really “lose” the Lisp Machine, or did we just realize that compiling Lisp to a general-purpose instruction set like x86 and then having someone else in charge of creating hardware to efficiently execute that is much more clever?
I've found that the best explanation of what we really lost is in some of the comments by Kent Pitman in some comp.lang.lisp discussions, like this one: [1] and this one [2]
[1] https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/QzKZCbf-S6g/m/K...
[2] https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/XpvUwF2xKbk/m/o...
Re: What have we lost? [video]
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still miss Warp. It was actually a pretty great OS. BeOS was fantastic as well.
OS/2 Warp was nice to work in and fully object oriented too. It was just too resource intensive and by the time they shipped, Windows was the default.
At the time, if you had a powerful system, it felt so much faster than Windows. OS/2 Warp had much better multi-tasking support at the time as well and it felt much more crisp. Windows was the default, but it was also really mediocre at the time.
Re: What have we lost? [video]
#59I was recently thinking a bit about how one could create a typed Forth-like system, by adding a 3rd parallel stack that would hold the type on the data stack, and was used for type checking. I really wanted to like Forth (which is very similar to Lisp/Smalltalk systems, even possibly more elegant in some respects), because of the system extensibility, but the stack errors drove me crazy. So if the system had the abil…
A third stack is one more thing to keep track of. The simpler solution to this in many languages is type tagging. E.g. Ruby (MRI at least) uses a few bits to indicate type to avoid creating full-blown objects for small-ish integers, symbols, etc., and you'll find the same approach in many strongly typed dynamic languages.
I think you misunderstand. The 3rd stack would be parallel to data stack, and would be used during interpretation for dynamic type checking (and also completion), or during compilation to do static type checking (and also type inference).
Re: What have we lost? [video]
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'd think I was an expert, given that I gave that segment of the talk, but I haven't yet dived that deep into Genera's internals. As I understand it though, you don't have the concept of page faults at the image level; IIRC, Genera doesn't have any form of virtual memory, or if it does, it's all in microcode. Task switches are , iirc, handled in the image, but in the same way that it's done in Smalltalk: there's a…
It was intentionally designed as a single user mode-machine wasn’t it?
Absolutely. There was no isolation between programs. In fact, you could write new programs by reusing parts of existing programs.