Re: Getting Young People into IBM i

My thoughts as someone who never worked professionally with IBM i or AS/400, but trie(s/d) to onboard some knowledge.

Due to the nature of the club I’m in (preserving digital heritage, running a vintage data centre), I had to "get into" many different platforms. As a day-to-day job, I’m heading a small dev team, running Java software on top of Linux clusters.

AS/400 and IBM i are "hard to get into", because of a few reasons. I’m sure most of them aren’t completely new to you, yet I wanted to show my perspective.

For a young person, to onboard a platform, you need to tinker with it, play with it. The easier the access to a platform is, the higher the likelihood that it works out.

* With old SunOS, Solaris, AIX, IRIX, HP-UX, VMS, A/UX, Coherent, Xenix -- there are either hobbyist licenses, or you don’t need a license at all. You can find hardware at scrap sales, flea markets, eBay and so on. Old AS/400 hardware (on non-professional sale) most of the time requires a LIC, that most of the times is lost. It’s not easy to get a box that you can play with easily, except the -150.

* This is even more of a pity, as "old" knowledge about AS/400 can mostly be useful on System i. The big advantage of the platform, being continous and adding improvements, doesn’t play out when you’re a hobbyist or an interested (private) learner. You have to be really committed to get something that you can tinker with.

* Sure, you can get along without a hardware terminal. But, especially for beginners, it’d be good to have one. This further increases the threshold of "how to get, where to place & store".

* RPG and COBOL have outside of this community a rather bad reputation, as being super-old-fashioned, and not being useful today, unless you want to specialize in it, and work with it for the rest of your life. Stating that there are millions of lines of (live) code out there still being used is not enough. Hey, FORTRAN and FORTH have a better image!

* Connectivity to other boxes: How do I share some data with my System i box, as a macOS, Windows, or Linux user? Does it speak a reasonably modern enough SMB? NFS? (No, FTP is not a valid answer)

Buying 2 AS/400 (as I did, and don’t have LICs for), only to buy a third one (150, which doesn’t need one), and a hardware terminal, and cables, is not for everyone.

To tinker with a platform, you need a small project. I either want to script a small hack, where I put some sensor data in the HTTP(S) sphere in a small web server script on my AS/400, or compute something and put a CSV onto a SMB or NFS share, or something similar. Stuff that I can easily do on my A/UX, or Solaris 2.4. Still don’t know how to on my -150.

Don’t get me wrong. I like green screens. I like the way my AS/400 box presents its TUI. I like the approach of IBM, to have a turnkey ready system for a small division in a box. Heck, I even like Token Ring, having multiple 8226 and 8228!

But I don’t see why students/young people would currently want to flock onto System i.

(And, btw, this is even more true for System z. The KIT (high-profile uni here) got a donation from IBM Böblingen: a fully fledged z 9xx, with lots of everything (giga-tera-peta …), to train students. I happen to know the guy heading the department. He sighed "everyone flocks towards these cheap Linux clusters, because they know stuff from playing with Linux at home. And although this Linux cluster is a boring NUMA architecture, people stick with it. This massive z box here would be much better suited for many of their tasks, but … it hasn’t seen a user login in months.")

I didn’t have lots of time, so this is a long email.

tl;dr: Lower the entry barriers by providing easier access to old (scrap) hardware incl. OS license. Have a file sharing offering.

Regards
Götz