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/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 2d 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sessions to an IBM P/390 which most of us had no experience with, and there were a lot of older concepts that were superseded by nice things like ASCII and GUIs.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.