Hello Götz,
Am 11.05.2023 um 16:24 schrieb Götz Hoffart <sub@xxxxxx>:
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.
That's why I try to build try-as400.pocnet.net: To make it easier for people used to common systems to get into the platform more easily. But I also know this is one of *many* resources in the internet.
* 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".
There's a comparably easy, modern way.
https://twindata.com/nlynx/usbtwinax.htm
But its price tag of $495 is at least hurtful, if not prohibitive for private use.
* 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.
I really wonder why C on IBM i was mainly used IBM internally and never got traction on the outside world. Perhaps because the shift from RPG III to modern all-free RPG was done gradually by IBM, allowing devs to adopt gradually, instead of learning a completely new language its own intricacies.
And today, a lot of Java applications are already established, because IBM started to push Java really hard around the turn of the century. Circa.
Stating that there are millions of lines of (live) code out there still being used is not enough.
The more intelligent ones will easily guess that this equals "maintain a decades old thicket of code for a chain of inter-acting application programs, no documentation, and the guy doing it before has already retired". ;-)
* 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)
What's the use case?
Modern releases of the OS "speak" a relatively modern SMB dialect, as well as being able to run an NFS server and client. This is enough to place binary blobs onto the file system to use it as a file server. Possible but I don't see this as the main strength of the platform. It's well known that the so called IFS isn't exactly the most performant part of the system.
The biggest advantage of FTP in this regard is it's transparent handling of charset conversion (EBCDIC, ASCII) for text (source) files, when using "mode ASCII" in FTP. Neither SMB, nor NFS have a similar feature.
To tinker with a platform, you need a small project.
Hey, that was my idea! ;-)
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.
Not sure what a http(s) sphere is, but it sounds doable.
Stuff that I can easily do on my A/UX, or Solaris 2.4. Still don’t know how to on my -150.
You assert to do it easily with your Unix platform or choice because you already roughly know how to do it. You only need to take care for particular intricacies.
Because the platform appears very alien to newbies (and this is not just because of green screen!) is some mainframe inherited concepts: Record oriented files, files with members, etc. But this is something that can be learned if explained properly. This is one of the goals of my try-as400.pocnet.net. IBM has a wealth of documentation but one thing IBM constantly fails is a "middle layer". IBM documents products and processes with certain products. They also provide a blurry, marketing-laden overview of what can be done. But the layer in-between is mostly void.
I'm sure if you want to do your web-thing on (Open)VMS, it also won't be as easy compared to doing it on some flavor of Unix. :-)
Nobody can relieve the need to learn, but we can make it easier to find relevant documentation.
tl;dr: Lower the entry barriers by providing easier access to old (scrap) hardware incl. OS license.
Amen, brother! ;-)
:wq! PoC
midrange.com
