Comment by theandrewbailey
12 hours ago
> Here we reach a point that is simultaneously the platform’s greatest advantage and heaviest burden. Due to such deep integration with dedicated and expensive hardware, IBM i is an “elite” system, in the less positive sense. A mere mortal, computer science student, or enthusiast has no chance to “touch” this system in the comfort of their home. You cannot download an ISO image from the internet, install it on a virtual machine in VirtualBox, or run it on your laptop. The barrier to entry is set at the price level of an IBM Power server, which effectively cuts off the supply of “fresh blood” and makes knowledge of this fascinating architecture passed down almost like guild knowledge, only within large organizations.
I took a course about these back in college. I thought it would be mind-expanding to see how computing could be outside of conventional Windows/Unix/Linux inspired environments, and use something with a very different design. The instructor had a desktop of one of these in his office. I remember logging into an official IBM educational system with a terminal emulator for an assignment.
Unfortunately, the instructor left about a month in, and I switched to a course involving UML modeling for programming Lego Mindstorm robots. Being hands-on with Mindstorms was cool, but I wonder what could have been had I finished the other course.
You can get IBM i (OS/400) running at home, but the hurdles are many. You need to have one of a specific set of PowerPC servers and need to "acquire" an operating system image. Which will be running in unlicensed demo mode. This YouTuber did it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUwJk81YatA
It's long been said that the biggest obstacle to wider adoption of the AS/400 is IBM itself. They offer classes, but don't make it easy - you have to join COMMON (their user group) and/or be enrolled in a university.
https://www.ibm.com/university/power/ibmi/
Amusingly, however - IBM did produce - or worked on - a Laptop AS/400, based on PowerPC for purely internal use. I believe it was designed for sales/marketing types to take on the road for demos
It likely would have been based on the PowerPC-based ThinkPad like laptop they produced which also ran AIX (IBM's version of Unix). like these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkPad_Power_Series
I was familiar with both the "laptop AS400" and the PowerPC thinkpad - these were different hardware unrelated to each other. I believe the sales demo machine was a CISC architecture demo machine that predated PowerPC, but I'm not 100% confident here. I never laid eyes on the AS400 sales demo machine but we were told about it in IBM AS/400 training school. I also had one of the PowerPC laptops running AIX for a while, nice little machines for the day.
Yes, they ran AIX, NT, OS/2 and Solaris, although the latter two only in half baked betas.
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> passed down almost like guild knowledge, only within large organizations.
That's the part that always killed me about trying to set foot into IBM mainframes. "Ask your system programmer". "Ask your X/Y/Z". Even when they finally decided to ease up and let people touch z/PDT, they had to make it a massive learning obstacle course to be blessed enough to buy a license (and now that's gone).
Not all of us can go out and acquire an entire IBM z and be blessed enough to be able to throw it in our basements to build up our knowledge on. :\