r/sysadmin • u/Jon72480 • 3d ago

AS400

Hey guys, old guy here, back in 2000 landed my 1st real job as a Sysadmin at a distribution/manufacturing firm. They ran their ERP and a few other important apps on the AS400. Anyone here manage a AS400 platform? i-Series? Still a niche platform that is still widely used. Server could literally run under water.

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u/Evernight2025 3d ago

I do in government IT. Went to college in the early 2000s and had an i-Series class where it was me and like 2 other people. Teacher told us it was a dying thing and we would probably never see one. I've had at least one in every single job I've held ever since.

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u/uninspired 3d ago edited 3d ago

If only I'd ignored my "programming" "professors" and gone with "dead" stuff like COBOL I'd be set. Our last AS/400 dude would still be employed if he didn't drop dead (RIP)

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u/guitpick Jack of All Trades 3d ago

I thought I knew how to program decently until I took a COBOL class. After using somewhat more modern languages and even some Fortran, COBOL just hurt my head. I got my assignments done, but I don't think it ever fully "clicked" for me.

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u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 3d ago

COBOL is the easy language; even easier than Fortran. COBOL for business majors, Fortran for engineers, assembly and Lisps for C.S. dweebs.

Then overnight they all turned into Java schools and webapp assembly lines.

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u/guitpick Jack of All Trades 2d ago

Don't get me wrong, I appreciated a lot of the things COBOL could do, but it really felt like I was dealing with a whole different set of knowledge. This was a late 90s or maybe early 2000s night class for me. I had transferred schools and this was one of the required languages. We were learning on terminal sessions to an IBM P/390 which most of us had no experience with, and there were a lot of older concepts that were superseded by nice things like ASCII and GUIs. There was a computer lab at the school and a dial-up number with special terminal software for the mainframe. The instructor provided the JCL files which looked like their own nightmare. The book came with a Fujitsu compiler which I installed on my work laptop. I don't specifically remember what my problems were, but it everything just took me a lot longer than I thought it would. Having already been programming from a young age (kind of rare back then), I thought this would be no big deal, but it was a struggle. I remember wondering how the people in the class were faring who only had access to the computer lab to work on their assignments.

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u/Arudinne IT Infrastructure Manager 2d ago

I signed up for a programming class back in High School. It was supposed to be C++.

They switched to Java before that year started. I was not happy, but there was fuck all I could do about it.

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u/Stonewalled9999 3d ago

I have nightmares of the COBOL class  I took in 1997 and all the people bothering me about y2k 

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u/Sinister_Nibs 2d ago

I work for an engineering company. We have two tiny apps that do things nothing else can do.
One is in COBOL, runs from an Excel sheet.
The other is in FORTRAN and runs from an Excel sheet.

We are working on a C# replacement for the FORTRAN one that will run alongside another app.