Big Blue has realised that a product that long disappeared from its catalogue is a rave from the grave that still has life in it yet. You would probably be surprised to learn just how many AS/400s are still about, and how many COBOL programmers for that matter.
It just goes to show that a company cannot force people to adhere to their End of Life Cycles. If a product is good, works well, and the customers are happy then what’s the point of upgrading it?
I think a lot of companies are beginning to realise that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Far too many times I have seen people arbitrarily upgrading just so they can have the latest and greatest (and with certain things I’m liable to fall into that trap too), but companies increasingly want value out of their IT resources, and that means keeping them around for a while when they are sufficient for the purpose.
It’s good to see that IBM will hopefully respond positively to that! I just wish Microsoft would do something similar with Windows 2000 – the people don’t want you to prematurely kill it off Microsoft – Copy IBM and “listen to the people”!
I always find the comment “Latest & Greatest” a little amusing. I remember a company I worked for “upgrading” from its As/400s to NT boxes (mid 90s).
Funny how the amount of downtime increased almost infinitely (AS/400s are renown for zero downtime!)
Talking to a colleague who still works there, they’ve now replaced all their M$ based machine room with, guess what, AS/400s, Suns and x86 things (Linux/Solaris).
I remember a company I worked for “upgrading” from its As/400s to NT boxes (mid 90s).
I’m sorry to say, but, what normal thinking person would use a 2-year old unproven operating system (NT was released in 1993) in a mission critical environment??
“I remember a company I worked for “upgrading” from its As/400s to NT boxes (mid 90s).”
I’m sorry to say, but, what normal thinking person would use a 2-year old unproven operating system (NT was released in 1993) in a mission critical environment??
So, you’re saying that you have never delt with people who read CIO magazine or PC Magazine when they aren’t reading Golf Digest?
I have a friend who is sucked up in that circle. Smart guy. Biased sources of information. He makes buying decisions and usually gets his way. He’s not a CIO but thinks of himself that way since the IT department isn’t up to the job of handling things professionally.
Yeah… These people should probably just stick to their golf digest, or just try to find an easy to use spreadsheet program to run analysis on their golf results and play progress.
They probably went to some talk which discussed the magic and miracles that will happen when they change to NT and then came back and harassed the poor IT guy to write up a 100 page justification to change their IT infrastructure when they don’t actually need to.
Bas****s.
These people are often called “managers” and have an unfortunate habit of believing what the hear from marketing persons….
Actually, AS/400 is not a “discontinued” or “lost” product. They’ve just renamed them iSeries (a few years ago).
AS/400 is one of those incredible architectures where software can run regardless of processor…ie: a modern power based iSeries can still run System 38 software.
Can you imagine swapping your x86 processor running Dos/Win3 for a SPARC/POWER/Whatever running Solaris/Linux WITHOUT having to upgrade/change/port/buy all your software again!!
and how many COBOL programmers
Well, I wouldn’t be surprised even a little. Just in the ~100 people in my section at work, about 40% are Cobol programmers. And they still seem to be hiring a bunch of them every now and then.
The thing is that when you’ve got some millions of lines of code it’s not easy to weight a need to replace them against the cost it would mean actually doing it.
and how many COBOL programmers
Still doing Y2K conversions?
Obviously, you have never worked for a financial company. The largest financial companies in the world, based on assetts held, individual contributors, etc., have thousands of COBOL programmers. And not just IBM Z/OS COBOL programmers. VAX/VMS Cobol is huge in the fixed income and mortgage industries.
Most of the 401K/retirement recordkeeping systems are COBOL/JCL/IMS/CICS/DB2 based. With millions of lines of code, it would be impossible to rewrite these apps in a port to distributed systems. The business groups that pay/fund development work do not see any logical reasoning as to why they would need to replace a system which works, has an API that is understood by millions (read Indian, Chinese, Philipino and Ukranian programmers), and, as long as IBM exists, has full support.
Most of the programmers who went to tech school to learn COBOL for the Y2K issues have long been RIF’ed.
Most of the 401K/retirement recordkeeping systems are COBOL/JCL/IMS/CICS/DB2 based. With millions of lines of code, it would be impossible to rewrite these apps in a port to distributed systems.
Not impossible just expensive. Open systems is more then capable of doing exactly what any AS/400 system does. Not to mention bridging the compatability gap.
Since there is no mass market TRULY open hardware, I assume you mean open SOURCE.
Well of course open systems can DO the work, and they may be able to do it faster, more efficiently, offer more features, etc. Guess what? Microsoft Windows can too. Big deal. Will it be as reliable, though? Will it simply shut up and work forever and ever? Will it be supported 24/7/365.251 by a company with a WORLDWIDE presence? Can I run my existing hugely complex custom apps unmodified and port them over incrementally? If not, can a quick recompile do the job?
The only platform I can think of that can give all this is Solaris, because it is (sorta) open. Otherwise, companies will keep their OpenVMS and AS/400 installations going as long as reasonably possible. Then, as EOL sneaks up on them, they will start the years of production and testing for something new.
–JM
PS: OpenVMS isn’t gone either, though it’s fate is unfortunately linked with that of Itanium. Thanks, HP (for nothing)
I should know, I used to do consulting/programming with on the thing, as well S/36 and S/38. The box was tight and preformed well. Almost 0 downtime with the exception of a hardware failure and it was a breeze to program for.
I actually learned to program on a S/38 and I was fresh out of highschool. It was that simple!
At work we gotta use an AS/400 system, most unuserfriendly system for inventory management I’ve ever used.
>At work we gotta use an AS/400 system, most
>unuserfriendly system for inventory management
>I’ve ever used.
So, it’s not ready for the desktop?
It may not have the most pretty interface, but the machine just runs. It is also fairly easy to work with and the database never fails as it is part of the OS.
15 Years on AS/400’s and only 3 unscheduled downtimes.
If it aint’ broke, just let it keep running.
A system truly made for mission critical environments, where people measure uptime in years, not in hours like the people running the proprietary Microseft XP joke do.
correct me if im wrong… but isn’t as400 proprietary as well? dumbass
You would be shocked at how much COBOL is still about these days. Most banks especially, and medium to large companies still have mainframes around, and they power the whole company. Linux? Windows? Oracle? SQL Server? Not a bit of it. Ultimately, without some sort of mainframe or an AS/400 kicking around just about every reasonably sized company in the world would go out of business overnight.
It doesn’t matter what bit of Visual Basic, .Net or Java code your write – if the COBOL running in some sort of mainframe environment, or an AS/400, doesn’t agree with your business logic and the output your application generates you can simply forget it. I think that might come as a shock to some of the people around here who think the world revolves around, and runs on, .Net or Java. It doesn’t, and it never will.
“a modern power based iSeries can still run System 38 software.”
Yeah, you REALLY want to do that.
I worked on System/32’s and System/34’s using RPG II and COBOL. The System/38 was noted for RPG III.
RPG is total CRAP. The small business machines were total CRAP.
Now I suppose we even have “Object-Oriented RPG” or some more stupid crap. I know some idiots have “OOP COBOL.”
I remember reading an article about the System/38 in one of the academic journals. Somebody wrote a rebuttal letter mentioning that while the IBM author of the original piece talked about “user friendly”, one of the System/38 utilities had a name like YSYSWISHFHIDIW or some crap like that, which he didn’t think supported the author’s concept.
This crap was OBSOLETE TWENTY YEARS AGO and becomes more so with every passing day.
COBOL? Idiots.
Years ago some moron manager at one of the big insurance companies sued the COBOL Standards Committee because they came out with a new standard in the late nineties, and this insurance company had spent tens of millions of dollars and hadn’t finished converting to the LAST standard the Committe came out with.
This was an insurance company with a HUGE IT department. How huge? Well, they had a two hundred fifty man computer science department WITHIN the IT department.
I said if these morons can’t figure out how to convert their COBOL code from one standard to another (let alone another language) with 250 computer scientists, they should pay ME ten million dollars and I’ll solve ALL their IT problems – and still make a nine million dollar profit, most likely.
Morons. Everybody in IT is a moron.
Every DDM has an AS/400 (there are at least 40 DDMs in Ohio but I don’t know if there are any out of state)
Just incase anyone cares…
well thanks for trying, but indeed, nobody cares.
Was it really EOL’d because of IBM thought people didn’t want/use it, or because IBM wanted to push iSeries developers to use Websphere. I think IBM wanted to push people to Websphere therefore dropped support for CGI using RPG (and others). That’s just my opinion.
I have seen first hand how easily RPG developers can create dynamic webpages without having to learn Java. They can use what they already know, to make applications that work that are lighter and faster than using Websphere.
At work, we have an 810 box that runs a completely homegrown application system in RPG/RPGLE. It’s amazing what our in-house developers are capable of.
Sure, they’re all green screen applications, but I feel that for data entry (and other jobs such as inventory inqueries and a whole lot more) the green screen beats a web interface any day. Although, pointy haired bosses want web integration. We’ve been struggling with this for a long time now with the iSeries.
We did try runing Websphere express, and tried Webshere Studio (or whatever it was) to write Java apps (sevelts and stuff) to access the data and present them in a web browser. The RPG programmers struggled with this. Then they found how to do CGI apps with RPG. It seemed that CGI apps written in RPG seemed like a better way to go. Unfortunately, it’s been unsupported therefore they really haven’t implemented anything real.
We still don’t have a web frontend to our system, but we do have web-to-host access. Not alot of people like using the green screen though. Personally, I wouldn’t trade it for a web frontend, but then I’m a geek who also prefers a command line to X (unless I’m web browing).
Oh well, just thought I’d put my $.02 in.
I was just talking to a programming friend yesterday.
I asked him what programming he did.
He answered “This is going to be the shortest conversation ever. I write COBOL programs to run on AS/400s.”
AS/400 is an outdated relic. The only reason it still exisits is because big blue went around selling these over priced systems to banks and hosipitals and the like 2 decades ago. These companies now over the years have such a huge investement is these ancient systems that they don’t want to spend the lump of money that it would take to free them of their IBM shackles.COBOL? RPG? as a modern coding platform? give me a break.
COBOL is still quite appropriate for certain types of applications.
A small window manufacturing company that I did a bit of contract programming for ran much of their assembly line and billing system on a little Unisys A-series mainframe, and while the front-end was being ported to a VB GUI for some of the interactive screens, the backend was all COBOL, and a lot of the data entry was still done using transaction masks. It seemed to work pretty well.
Where I work we tend to use Fortran. 🙂
Since there is no mass market TRULY open hardware, I assume you mean open SOURCE.
No i am not talking about Open Source i am talking about Open Systems a few definitions.
“Open systems provide a standards-based computing environment, possibly including but not limited to UNIX,TCP/IP,APIs,and GUIs.”
“When all types and brands of hardware and software equipment are interchangeable and able to function together.”
Versus hugely proprietary IBM systems like MVS and AS/400(iSeries). These systems do not play well with anything outside of IBM designs not to mention they have horribly outdated interfaces. Again the reasons that these relics are still around is becasue porting custom applications developed for these antique platforms is not easy to do. However 9 times out of 10 there are COTS packages that would suffice with little modification. Hardware is at a point where it is just as reliable or more reliable then IBM closed systems. Don’t get me wrong these were great systems back in the sixties and seventies but technology and standards have passed them up along time ago.
Even Unisys has a Java Virtual Machine that runs natively on their OS2200-based Clearpath mainframes (can’t speak for the A-series/MCP side), supports third-party web servers, has native TCP/IP and CIFS support, etc.
I’m sure IBM has the same. Don’t forget that the newer IBM mainframes can all run Linux, and I think even z/OS is POSIX certified.
Don’t confuse modern mainframes with their ancestors.
While mainframes have typically had proprietary OSes that are tightly coupled to specialized hardware, they have also tended to thrive in connected environments, and if the mainframe itself can’t speak to other boxen, there are certainly optional subsystems or dedicated satellite processors available which can.
Some companies still use mainframes because of history, and because of the cost of application conversion.
Others use mainframes because nothing else exists which can adequately solve the problem when a large-scale, reliable, secure, and centralized application is involved. Sun boxes aren’t big enough yet to handle top-end reservations systems, for example.
We do a lot of Java programming on our i5. Java first came to AS/400 around 4 years ago and at the time it was the ONLY machine that could compile Java bytecode to 64 bit machine code. I can save a JAR to the IFS (/ to you lot
) and compile it to machine code *PGM. When i run it (java blah blah) it will execute the program object not the class.
This thing is fast. Makes our Opterons, Xeons look stupid.
I’ll use nothing else. Also, DB2/400…. what more can i say. APYJRNCHG (Appy Journaled Changes) has got me out of a bind on more than one occasion LOL.
daz