Re: Getting Young People into IBM i

Apparently I’m still considered young, but the back pain is already there (although that might have something to do with carrying around CHONKY or CHUNGUS here).

I got into i by adopting a Model 170 many years ago, posting to this mailing list asking what to do with it, and having some wonderful people respond off-list and I've built long-lasting friendships through the year like this.

One thing which would help a lot from my perspective (and that I see with other younger people that want to pick it up), is access:

- getting older machines to work is hard (i.e. the SCSI DASD issues, consoles, keyboards being scavenged etc). This is a challenge that can be overcome, and most people get there eventually. This is sadly not something we can do something about here.

- software access is hard. In an ideal world, I would see SW releases for P6 or older be offered for non-commercial purposes free of charge (similar to the OpenVMS world). This would allow these older machines to be operated a lot easier. For pre-PPC systems, a SYSTEM PASSWORD generator being published would mean a lot to being able to keep those machines running.

Re: CISC machines, those issues are becoming more and more pressing since troubleshooting current age-related failure modes often trips this. Providing a generator (or publishing the algorithm) wouldn't result in any lost business (operations that run this hardware aren't paying customers any more anyways), but would allow the preservation of these systems.



On 11/05/2023, 17:53, "MIDRANGE-L on behalf of James H. H. Lampert via MIDRANGE-L" <midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> on behalf of midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:


I was young, once.


I had a big advantage coming into the Midrange milieu. Maybe a few.


First, although my University (CSU Long Beach, Class of 1985) was a CDC
Cyber/DEC PDP-11 shop, and the only IBM product I used there was a
first-generation IBM-PC, for one class (an experimental game-writing
class), my two years of *high school* programming were on an IBM 370/135
(running, as I've said before, McGill University MUSIC). And while all
student terminals were simple ASCII, nothing smarter than a Lear ADM-1,
all running through a front-end processor (something called a CC8), *I
knew what EBCDIC was, had at least read about 3270 data stream
terminals, and understood the IBM approach to timesharing.* (Indeed,
being used to the IBM approach, with long, variable-length timeslices,
and offloading async terminals to front-end processors, I found the
non-IBM approach of sub-second timeslices, host-echo, and so forth to
be, if you'll pardon my Yiddish, meshuga.)


And when I *did* move on to the University (already fluent in two
dialects of BASIC, and learning FORTRAN IV), almost everything was
taught on mainframes, with terminals (mostly Teleray 10s), and I made it
my business to learn even more programming languages than were required
for my degree, ending up also fluent in Pascal, COBOL, PL/I, PDP-11
Assembler, and (LISP). And knowing how to write a recursive-descent
parser. And I'd already found the biggest flaw in Niklaus Wirth's
understanding (at least as of when he designed Pascal) of structured
programming theory: you *don't* always *want* a FOR loop to run to
completion.


I suspect that a major problem with kids today is that they're taught
everything in only one or two languages, and all of it on desktop
systems. And I think we all know the old saw about what happens when the
only tool in your toolbox is a hammer.


--
JHHL