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Comment by usr1106 | Hacker News Reader

Looks like it has been running for 20 years and is community operated? From the headline I misinterpreted this to be a commercial cloud.

I used VAX/VMS and VM370/CMS in the 80s. I have fond memories of VAX/VMS and still log in to the machine at the computer museum to play dungeon. Would also program Lisp or so, but have not figured out how to transfer files.

For IBM my feelings are more mixed. The VM side was certainly what the rest of the world got only 30 years later. The CMS side felt already a bit obsolete then when you could run X11 on a Sun.

Have never used AS/400, but from all what I have heard it is horrible even compared to CMS.

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> ...and is community operated? From the headline I misinterpreted this to be a commercial cloud.

I think this is run by a company that does offer commercial AS/400 instances, but they also provide free non-commercial accounts on this one box. Which is nice because it's not trivial to get your hands on your own system as a hobbyist.

> Have never used AS/400, but from all what I have heard it is horrible even compared to CMS.

I wouldn't say it's horrible compared to CMS. It's just _very_ different. I have played with quite a few operating systems...it's a bit of a hobby of mine... and OS/400 is the most different.

In terms of writing simple terminal-oriented forms applications to do basic CRUD operations against a relational database, OS/400 is actually pretty nice.

It's just such a WEIRD system.

The thing I find frustrating about it is that while it has a lot of interesting security controls, the defaults are wide open and I suspect there aren't a lot of people who could secure it to the point where you could give untrusted users "shell" access and not worry you've left some little nook or cranny open to them that you didn't mean to. [Presumably at least one of those people are involved with the pub400.com system!]

I was working for a client that uses AS/400 a few years ago. They exposed an API for their internal application as an FTP service, which really blow my mind. I guess it's quite similar with REST API in many ways. Is it common to do that in AS/400 land? Now that I think about it, SWIFT is also an FTP-based API service, right?

AS/400 aka iSeries is not horrible. I prefer Unix type servers these days because they have pretty much won the server space. But the AS/400 has some pretty neat stuff like command prompting.

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