An introduction to the IBM i Power System Module 1 Intro | AS400 | iSeries | AS/400 | System i

Do you know the difference between an IBM AS/400, iSeries, System i and IBM i Power System? Do you *think* that an AS400 is the computer that is driving your business? Do you call the business system "The Four Hundred"? Then this course is for you....

[ootenyafoo]

I spent my whole IT career - 28 years - in the IBM midrange systems. My last 25 years were with the AS/00 - System i boxes.  I've been retired over 8 years now but consider myself very fortunate to have worked with what I consider the best business computing systems ever developed.  Elegant is the best way to describe these machines.

[psikeyhackr]

This is great! Very nice perspective.

I took my first computer course during the summer of 1969. It was FORTRAN on a System 3 Model 8 I think. I got hired by IBM as a Customer Engineer in 1978 and sent to their training center in Atlanta.

It was great! Get hired on a new job and sent on vacation to a warmer place. It was easy because I was used to troubleshooting to the transistor level.

Anyway I was trained on the System 32, sorters and keypunch machines. I built my first computer in the apartment IBM reserved for employees in training, a Heathkit H-8.

I was eventually trained on the entire System 3 line, System 34 and Series 1. I wrote benchmarks for the Datamaster 23 and found it was slower than the 5100 it replaced.

I helped with the installation of a System 38 but was never trained on it. I left IBM and switched to microcomputers. Never dealt with AS/400s.

What is RISC-V going to do to everything?

[MrLampbus]

Good memories ... I had a System/34 fully loaded ... from memory ... it had two processors a Main Store Processor (MSP) which was 8? bit and mine had 256K RAM. This was controlled by the Control Store Processor (CSP) that was 16 bit and had less memory, but the CSP had all the IO connected ... several modems, a console and a bunch of Twin-ax connectors for quite a few interactive terminals, a printer interface(may have actually been on twin-ax) and the Hard drives, and also the cartridge floppy drive (room for two ten slot carts and 3 ish "loose" floppies. It had four 62ish MB hard drives.
It ran "System Support Program" (SSP) as the OS, and I programmed it in RPG (report program generator) and SDA (Screen design aid) to access indexed files as interactive apps and also batch processes like month end processing and reporting.
It could run a version of IBM BASIC, but for some reason that only worked on the CSP ... perhaps this was a carry over from the System 32 ?

[opprometheus]

I've worked on most of these. The System/38 was really the predecessor to the AS/400. Best I can remember it was a relational database. You had DDS for creating external file/record layouts. The System/36, however was a completely different OS. It was not a relational DB and file/record layouts we defined in the program. It was also not a command driven OS perse. If you went to an AS/400 from the System/36 you could run all your code, but you had to run in the System/36 environment. This was an environment that run underneath OS/400. Currently working on a Power9 9009-41A. Been a great career! If I had been a Windows application developer, I'd probably be insane by now. :)

[williamsullivan]

Great Systems my career ran from System 38 to I series never lost a Bit of data. From Sys 38 to AS400 was the biggest leap in operability.

[monkeyseatcatfood]

Very grateful for this video! Started working with z/OS for a couple years now, and while I've heard the names AS/400 and IBM i Series--I never really knew what it was (just assumed they're basically the same thing as z/OS). Now I know there's some important differences!

[ah]

Started on a Sys/38 and then B50, F50, 320, 620, Oracle on an AIX box…. Always called it an AS400. Well, not in the 38 days.. A very reliable and capable machine.

[jamespleger]

Even before the System/3 was the System/360 Model 20. It was a junior version of the System/360 line, and not very much like the other 360 machines, which were physically much larger. Its peripherals typically included a card reader, an MFCM (multi-function card machine), and a 1403 printer. It had from 8K to 32K of storage, and the primary software was the original RPG (Report Program Generator), although a "Basic Assembler" assembly language was available too. Many System/360 Model 20 users migrated to the System/3.

[bryanrobinson]

I’d like to get technical for a minute here. I read in and old AS/400 book that the OS/400, and thus I guess IBM i too, does not reuse virtual addresses. As such, it was necessary to schedule periodic IPLs to recompute the address space when it ran out of address space. I understand why, as it gets rid of all of the heap access issues such as use-after-free that plague Windows and Linux systems. But how frequent did one have to IPL the system? And in the 2020s with POWER 9 and 10 hardware and 64 bit address spaces, how often does one have to IPL a modern system due to the address space growth over time?

[solgongola]

I am disappointed that there was no mention of the Series 1.

The S/38 introduced a system that incorporated database, SQL, and display management as part of the operating system. Files definitions included a schema with field/column definitions that could be imported into program structures and display definitions. But the S/38 was not compatible with the S/34. The OS and command structure was completely different, the languages supported were not the same, programs could not be easily ported and there was resistance to upgrading. They both had RPG but the S/34 had Fortran but not the S/38 which had Cobol. IBM resolved this with the S/36 which was S/34 compatible.

The AS/400 was fully compatible with the S/38. It was able to run "observable" S/38 programs without even recompiling. S/36 programs did need recompilation. It had both S/38 and S/36 compatibility environment so that these users could continue using a familiar menu and development environment until they completed migration.

[JosephDAndrea]

Working on a 9406-520 for a customer right now