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snovymgodym 15 hours ago

Costco still uses AS/400 company-wide for their inventory system I think

markus_zhang 14 hours ago | parent [-]

Interesting. Looks like it suits them perfectly. I wonder if the AS/400 is running in an emulator or on a real machine.

snovymgodym 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I doubt it, probably just running on a regular Power ISA rack mount server from IBM. Though I guess technically all IBM i aka AS/400 is running on an emulator.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_i#Technology_Independent_M...

snuxoll 13 hours ago | parent [-]

Nope, we still have an IBM i deployment kicking around at $DAYJOB, it's running natively on POWER hardware. Way back in the days of the original OS/400 running on AS/400 hardware, IBM had the foresight to have applications compile to MI (Machine Interface) code; which is a bytecode format closer to something like LLVM IR instead of something like JVM or CLR bytecode. When a PGM object is copied or created on an IBM i system, TIMI (Technology Independent Machine Interface) takes the MI code and translates it to a native executable for the underlying platform.

We probably still have a couple of PGM objects kicking around on our modern POWER hardware that were originally compiled on an old AS/400 system, but they run as native 64-bit POWER code like everything else on the machine.

The IBM midrange line gets a lot of undue disgust these days, it's not sexy by any means, sure, but just like anything running on modern day Z/OS you know that anything you write for it is going to continue to run decades down the line. Well, as long as you limit the amount of stuff you have running on 'modern' languages; because Java, Node, Python, Ruby, etc. are all going to need upgrades while anything written in 'native' languages (RPG, COBOL, C/C++, CL) compiles right down to MI and will keep working forever without changes.

sillywalk 13 hours ago | parent [-]

Nitpick:

The Machine Interface dates back to AS/400's predecessor, the System/38.

snuxoll 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Thanks, I was desperately trying to remember because I swore there was something beforehand, but It's been a very long time since I did the reading.

sillywalk 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

As far as I know, there are no AS/400 emulators.

It's still updated by IBM and runs on POWER. It's just called "i" now.

I believe the naming went something like AS/400->iSeries->System i->System i5->i