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Comment by calvin_ | Hacker News Reader

I was never paid by IBM to do anything; this is a hobbyist endeavour.

Really? Wow. I just assumed it was paid because I wouldn't have expected a hobbyist endeavor to port software to a proprietary Unix and mainframe OS running on expensive hardware.

Do you develop for AIX and IBM i for work and have access to hardware and inspiration to do this for that reason? If not, how did you wind up picking this as a hobbyist endeavor?

I know a friend who's employer was throwing out an E4A. OS/400 is also pretty interesting from an architecture perspective too.

Yeah, it might be kind of interesting to play around with IBM i/OS/400.

Oh, and I guess I shouldn't have called it a mainframe operating system; that's z/OS. IBM i is their minicomputer operating system.

Hardware-wise, IBM i can scale up from basically a thick pizza box to something relatively monstrous in size. The architecture and OS are still relatively advanced, too, even by today's standards. Those of us who know its history sometimes think of it as "IBM: The Next Generation", since it was based at least in part on the Future Systems project, a replacement computer architecture that never quite came to complete fruition. IBM has never marketed it as a mainframe-class system, though.

I used an AS/400 as operator back in 1994, was mostly taking care of doing backups.

Sadly I never got to program into them, but at least .NET (on Windows), Android seem to share some of the ideas.

I'm more impressed that you were able to acquire the unobtanium that is AIX on POWER, let alone System i (the real iOS, not the one from the fruit company)

IBM partners to offer AIX and System i VMs for open-source people to use to port their software. Links that were posted elsewhere:

http://osuosl.org/services/powerdev

http://openpower.ic.unicamp.br/minicloud/

https://fit-rhlab.rhcloud.com/powerlinux-openpower-developme...

https://ptopenlab.com/cloudlabconsole/

I thought the real IOS was from company with the bridge logo that rhymes with Crisco lard, especially since IBM iSeries is just a renamed AS/400 - OS/400 from 2006.

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