The IBM as/400 minicomputer was introduced in 1988. It offered its programming code libraries and application program interface to business IT shops as a quick and powerful way to develop custom applications. It facilitated hardware expansion and evolution without changes to the software layers. You could spend $12,000 or $2,000,000 for the system, and be up and running quickly. By the mid 90's the high powered PC was putting most minicomputers out of business, but the AS/400 survived because of its adaptability and solid business profile.
Yesterday I bought one for my basement.
It stands 61" high, and is 24" wide, and 3 feet deep. It runs on 240 volt current on a power buss that is two inches in diameter (that is the plug and power cord>) It probably weighs close to 900 lbs, considering it rack mounts two 9733 hard drives that weigh over 100 lbs apiece, in addition to about a dozen "feature cards" and a cpu cage the size of a toaster oven. I am guessing about 2000 watts minimum.
It isn't pretty to look at. Doesn't seem to have any design sense at all, in fact, in its plain vanilla box with no real blinking lights to speak of.
I hope it works. I am finding that I can download a terminal emulator for windows from SourceForge that will have me speaking to the monster in its own language fairly quickly. It just needs to work. If it lights up and the OS is still installed and boots, I might be talking to it in a week or so.
I do write data analysis programs for fun, and compose computer music. I have no idea at this time what I am going to do with the AS/400 if it works. It probably has two processors that are 32 bit CISC cpus running around 20 mhz, which means it was outpaced in sheer throughput by the first pentiums available in late 1996, if I remember correctly. I have a small, old, happy pentium 90 running windows 98 in the studio that I use strictly for midi utilities that talk to old synths from that era, and it might be more powerful than the AS/400.
If that is the case, why bother schlepping a half ton of high quality engineering and spending dozens of hours retrofitting an interface into an obsolete operating system in order to program in a clumsy, integer only environment with limited or non existant graphics output while paying the electric bill on a housefull of appliances for one big bland toy?
I guess you had to be there.
I guess you had to sit in night school for 13 months learning to write code for the IBM 360 mainframe on punch cards. I guess you had to learn RPG and Sperry Terminal language by filling in mimeographed grids and flow-chart templates in pizza joints at midnight in your thirties, when you had just gotten married and were seized with a vision of computer science that burned in your head like a halogen bulb. I guess you had to struggle for two decades to see the vision realized partially on a 20 pound box that contained more computing power than the entire united states armed forces had at its disposal in 1968, and had to lose the physical sense of that effort over time as computers became smaller and lighter and faster.
My apprenticeship was at the breast of a monster that filled a room. It weighed tons, and was delivered in a semi truck by a crew of men who then took a week to install its special electrical connections, peripherals, air conditioning. When I wrote my first IBM assembler language program I had to wait two hours for my turn to submit my cards to the card reader, and then watch the huge consoles run the thirty lines of code in a millisecond. There was a presence and a gravitas to the ritual. Part of me resisted being taken in by it, and just wanted the results, which the generation of PCs waiting in the wings were quick to provide. But part of me responded to the priesthood, the steel and lightening of the oracle unleashed among mortals. That part got shoved into the bottom of a file drawer sometime in the mid eighties while practical matters pushed me along.
Yesterday that part of me got out and stretched, and looked at the spawn of the mother processors of my apprenticeship, and patted it on the head. The giant baby Blue looked like it was ready to play. The gods of ebcedic and hexadecimal looked down from a vanishing olympus and smiled at the folly. They understood. They had been there.
Posts
