Inside an IBM AS/400 eSeries Factory [video]

> They are so slow, though.

I guess that depends?

I used to go to an AS/400 ERP software conference every year. The number of users dwindled and each year was a game of "Who's missing this year..."

Rightfully, everyone was going to SaaS products or Windows-based systems.

One year, I didn't see a group that was usually there (they were missed as always bought tons of company swag to give away). Emailed the CTO after the conference to ask what was up, and they were 75% complete switching over to one of the big-name, Windows-based on-prem ERP systems.

They bought the software, 4/5 Windows licenses for SQL, IIS, backup server, etc. The next year they were back at the conference! They could never get the new software to process their daily shipping fast enough for it to work.

I haven't seen that its slow, except when the RAID battery is off. Generally the IBM rep shows up when that happens.

We've has one and its successors (iSeries) since the 90's and we have never had a crash of any sort. We've had hardware failures, but the IBM rep fixes those and the machine never crashed because of any of them. The damn thing is rock solid and we bought a new one (Power9) last year.

My sample is of a couple of hundred AS/400 machines. This was prior to the rebranding to iSeries

They were used for accounting, logistics, and point of sales systems at different companies.

Common for nearly all was that they lacked any IT department or even a sole tech geek.

Nothing is perfect. it makes sense there might be some lemons around but from my experience they were the most reliable platform I have ever been in contact with.

in different companies used mostly for accounting, logistics, and some POS systems that were entirely lacking any IT department or even the odd tech geek.

Probably around the same time, we had a client where IBM convinced them to install Lotus Notes/Domino on their iSeries, which ran their factory assembly line. This caused extended downtime and cost them tons of money. IIRC they ultimately installed a Pentium II board into the iSeries running NT and ran Lotus off that... silly

> but “rock solid” might as well be an urban legend.

I can indeed confirm that "rock solid" is an urban legend. I swore I'd never have anything to do with the AS/400 or IBM after a certain incident.

I need to be careful what I say, but basically there was a certain fault with a certain chip on a certain board.

The so-called IBM technicians we called out ultimately proved to be completely incompetent. Our engineers were collecting hard-facts data on the fault(s) we were seeing. But the IBM guys could never find the problem.

In the end, because IBM engineer after IBM engineer continued to sign-off the machine, we had little choice but to allow it to continue in production albeit with close monitoring.

In the end, it ended up with an almighty climax event. Let's just say its the first (and hopefully only) time I've witnessed an IT company's Professional Indemnity insurance being used in anger to pay for recovery (and indeed why if you are involved with the management of an IT company you should ensure such insurance is in place).

TL;DR The client's AS/400 was thrown onto the scrap heap as soon as humanly possible after an all-hands-on-deck accelerated migration away took place.

file drop apis weren't so bad. drop a file in the input directory with a unique name, wait for the response to appear in the output directory. with samba these became easy to work with.

i wrapped a couple of these with soap webservices back in the day and any reliability issues almost always came from the soap server.

ups used to be a gigantic as/400 shop... i wonder if they're still using them...

Thank you for clearing up my cognitive dissonance. I mean, how many people had jobs programming RPGs? How many people possibly played role playing games on AS/400?

From listening to their podcasts / twitter spaces it sounds like they're building machines from the ground up. I get the impression they'd hate the analogy, but an apple style take on owning the hardware and software together.

For a dip into how deep in the weeds they are, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCkuCkp3Zoo (they also do this as "oxide and friends" wherever you find podcasts, which is a nuisance to link to but works better)

Not a blade. They're selling whole racks because that's the level that the hyperscalers work at, and Oxide are trying to bring the same class of systems to on-prem deployments. The closest comparison would be to something like modern mainframes, though the provided featureset might be subtly different. (For one thing, Oxide systems are ordinary x86 systems at the CPU architecture level; it's just "everything else" that's potentially custom.)

No dude. They are reimagining the firmware and ROMs on the mother board, and so on. I recommend looking further into it.

Perhaps, but if their secret sauce produces a much better product, I'm not terribly concerned that the value-add is a software-based and not hardware-based.