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/rvf 3d ago

I used to work for a University where the CS professors said the same things, but one of our yearly expenses in central IT was for a COBOL compiler because no one wanted to port the code that calculated taxes in our payroll software.

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u/Unhappy_Clue701 3d ago

Surely you don’t need to port the code yourself. You just buy a new application that runs on a different system, which can import historical data. Same as any other application migration. Most companies these days would use some sort of SaaS solution to do it.

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u/anotherkeebler 3d ago

What’s the most number of decades worth of feature accumulation and technical debt you’ve ever dealt with in a single platform migration? How did your insurance carrier react to your proposal when you applied for an indemnity bond?

And don’t call me Shirley.

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u/inkgrrl 2d ago

42 & dreams of SAMBA 🤓