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Comment by variodot | Hacker News Reader

IBM i was k8s before k8s, with fewer yaml files and better backwards compat

Some of my first exposure to enterprise IT was via the AS/400 and served as a fantastic basis for the cloud stack and agents of today.

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We live in the shattered remains, badly reconstructed, of what a true operating system could be - we have some of the pieces (zfs, k8s, virtualization, scaling, failover, nixos, qubes) but imagine it all put together, orchestrated, carefully documented and tested by immense number of engineers. Ah, what could have been.

The older I get, the more compelling the IBM universe seems.

This is what it feels like to look in at Linux from the outside as a Windows admin used to corporate-enforced consistency.

Sure, Microsoft has stumbled a bit recently, but around the 2010s it was a glorious era of PowerShell and Windows Server releases that were still improving.

I remember being quite young and proud that I had built something using Samba and Kerberos that mimicked an NT domain controller, and how powerful it was for our little LAN in the dorm, and why would anyone pay M$ for this, and then barely a few years later using small business server and being like "oh, that's why".

The problem is license costs. IBM makes a great system but almost all their customers have been working hard to replace it, not because of issues with the quality but the high license costs.

IBM AS/400 lineup was fully designed to optimize customer segmentation and threfore capture better the customer value. For example, there were cheaper models where the hardware was exactly the same as more expensive models except for additional hardware loops to make things run slower. That’s why they had so many models, they wanted to have a price point available for every company size.

There's really only one acceptable price for an OS, and it's the same as the only acceptable price for a browser or DB - $0.00. The precedent has been pretty solidly set (Linux, FreeBSD, MySQL, Postgres, Chrome, Firefox...) at this point, hence all the pivots to charging for service and support and suchlike.

Turns out it's far easier to do stuff if you are in control of every single level.

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