Hacker News Reader

Comment by debacle | Hacker News Reader

The AS/400 OS is one of the most arcane systems I've ever used. Power users can do some incredible things, but I think long-term use results in strange things.

View on HN

We still work with an AS/400 (IBM iSeries) on a daily basis for legacy data, and it's impressive to watch how quickly our older staff members navigate the interface and get work done with it. It's several orders of magnitude faster than our newer web-based ERP, and I don't think I can be convinced that any modern browser UI will ever match the efficiencies offered by a terminal-based interface. That's not to discount the numerous technical benefits you reap by moving to a modern software stack, but strictly from an end-user usability standpoint, the AS/400 still wins in my book.

> I don't think I can be convinced that any modern browser UI will ever match the efficiencies offered by a terminal-based interface.

But you can run a terminal in the browser. It’s a pretty common way to interact with cloud servers. And as long as the server isn’t on the other side of the planet it’s not noticeably slower than a local terminal.

The problem isn’t the technology, its the sad state of UI engineering.

It's comparing apples with oranges. Your typical web based UI is layers and layers of rasterized graphics, meanwhile a terminal is the frontend for a platforms serial console.

I'm sure you can emulate the same performance in a modern webbrowser, it's just that no one cares, because no system administrator relies solely on web interfaces to get work done.

>> no system administrator relies solely on web interfaces to get work done

Increasingly, they do. And prefer to, because if it's in a browser, it's probably someone else's cloud system that they don't have to administer.

How is that different from a veteran Linux programmers/sysadmin skilled in $whatever shell and language of choice?

Our staff can run our ERP on a browser on a phone at the airport. I imagine it's hard to get 5250 on an iPhone. =D

Here you go, https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tn5250/id284741179

To me, before I met Unisys' MCP, it was the epitome of user-hostile OS. Not because it's particularly difficult to navigate, but that everything is deeply alien (same feeling as z/OS, BTW).

Then I met MCP, where everything is both hard to navigate AND deeply alien. ;-)

I'm sure Alan Kay is on my side on that one.

> To me, before I met Unisys' MCP, it was the epitome of user-hostile OS. Not because it's particularly difficult to navigate, but that everything is deeply alien (same feeling as z/OS, BTW).

Nit, but you're not describing something that's "user-hostile," just something that's unfamiliar to the user that is you.

Alien could actually be very good and user-friendly, since a lot of the stuff we're used to frankly sucks, and we're stuck as at an inferior local maxima that's very hard to get out of.

> something that's unfamiliar

True, but unfamiliar and hard to learn combine to make it forbidding to newcomers.

Case in point: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/26398/how...

> True, but unfamiliar and hard to learn combine to make it forbidding to newcomers.

> Case in point: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/26398/how...

Though that's MVS, which probably should no be conflated with OS/400. The former is all kinds of trouble because it maintains compatibility with stuff from really old and limited systems, while the latter is quite a bit newer than UNIX so could have alien-advanced "science fiction" features.

True. It's a bit mind blowing that some metaphors in MVS (that carry over to z/OS) are rooted on decks of punched cards.

OS/400 has much newer ones and some of those are futuristic even now (the single memory map that encompasses fixed storage is a pretty cool one, even though deeply alien for most people).

Perhaps it's bad PR?

The TRON MCP was definitely hostile. Not sure if its victims could have been considered "users", though.

https://www.google.com/search?q=tron+mcp

Master Control Program

It really didn't like users though. It tried to kill Flynn a couple times.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com