Many moons ago we ported a product from z/OS to the AS/400 and were similarly impressed with the sorts of things you mention. The OS was solid as a rock.
There is a major learning curve -- the darned thing is unlike any other computer. And many APIs are locked up and not available without some special license or fee. For example, in every other operating system I have used, a program can open an executable file (.exe, load module, etc.) as a normal file and read it -- typically just like any other file, if that makes sense in the particular situation. Not so in OS/400. Also as I recall a lot of services were only available via panels -- like if ISPF were the *only* way to accomplish certain z/OS tasks. It was a somewhat tough port for the reasons described. Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of John McKown Sent: Thursday, July 5, 2018 6:07 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: IBM i as JCL replacement (was: Rexx as JCL replacement) On Wed, Jul 4, 2018 at 1:56 PM Jack J. Woehr <[email protected]> wrote: > On 7/4/2018 11:00 AM, Paul Gilmartin wrote: > > JCL has numerous restrictions and inconsistencies due to antiquity, > > IBM i supports Cobol. Come on down :) > A few years ago, the IBMi was under consideration to replace our, very old, IBMz. I got some documentation on it. I was _extremely_ impressed. Now, for a "hard coded" system _programmer_, it is death. Because there simply is not much to do. Basically apply maintenance and parameters. No real programming, except perhaps some type of utility. ILE COBOL looks good. Well, as good as any COBOL looks to me {grin}. I love the fact that the basic filesystem is really a relational database. So you can not only access it as if it were a "keyed" file (like VSAM KSDS) but also as SQL database like DB2. They also have PACE, which is the "POSIX compliant" portion, which is "hooked onto" the IBMi like "Unix System Services" is "hooked onto" the historic z/OS system. There is an email group for it too. The people there are also fantastically helpful. I posted that we were looking into the IBMi and one person sent me about 5 books on it -- at HIS expense! I was "knocked on my butt". > > -- > Jack J. Woehr # Science is more than a body of knowledge. It's a way of > -- There is no such thing as the Cloud. It is just somebody else’s computer. Maranatha! <>< John McKown ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
