Today, I wanted to show you one of the most fascinating and surprising operating systems ever created. It’s not another Unix, Linux, or Windows. It is an architecture that went its own way and proved that systems engineering design can look completely different.
I’m talking about IBM’s child, which for many might be synonymous with “boring banking systems,” but in reality, is one of the most uncompromising projects in IT history. While we get excited about abstraction and virtualization today, thinking we are discovering new lands, this system was doing it decades ago. Imagine a system that doesn’t know the concept of a “file” in the way we understand it. A system where everything is an object, and all disk and operational memory form one vast, flat space. If you are looking for proof that true engineering doesn’t need buzzwords to blow you away, I invite you to read on.
↫ Kamil Pytliński
Ever since watching Clabretro’s detailed video about getting IBM i to work on his own IBM POWER hardware and then remoting into them, I’ve been obsessed with running IBM i at home. It feels like the final boss of operating systems to dive into and explore, hidden in the deepest, darkest trenches of the ocean of technology. Everything about IBM i feels alien, complex, convoluted, opaque, and overwhelming, and you can probably dedicate your entire career to working with this platform and somehow still learn new things about it every day.
There’s something brutalist about IBM i, and I so desperately want to bang my head on its concrete walls.
In college I had a class on SQL/400 and the instructor had an AS/400 server in the classroom that we all logged in to using real hardware terminals. He was a huge IBM guy, and had been studying and teaching the platform pretty much since its inception, and he loved it when his students had the same “a-ha!” moments he had himself experienced when learning the system.
And yes, it felt alien even to someone like me who had previously operated data terminals at a government office job.
I started my third 3rd career based on AS/400: My former employer had only experience with small European banks and Oracle and then failed miserable when the largest Indonesian Bank showed up with some real data volume on an AS/400. Their ETL just went belly up after 2 hours with less then 1 mln records extracted or so.
I was the only boots on ground, there was a long weekend in a boring hotel in Jakarta and on Tuesday, the whole 40 mln records were written into compressed Loader files in less than 20 minutes. That was the start of my own company in 2010 and this ETL module is still the backbone of everything I am doing. Thank you IBM!