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Admin
These sponsored articles never end well, this will be no exception.
Admin
Can I have a link to these "Hired" guys? I can't find any.
Admin
Everything must talk to that dinosaur because that 1980s IBM, doing fixed point decimal in COBOL and running REXX scripts encoded in EBCDIC actually works, while your modern, distributed, LAMP-stacked webapp, merely runs.
Admin
Damn kids nowadays!!
AS400 is NOT a mainframe. Neither is it ancient.
Try an IBM 360 (as RLB says) running fixed point decimal COBOL.
Admin
@someone - Don't bother. They only seem to be interested in a very small subset of trendy roles and locations, so if you're, say, a C++ developer in Georgia with experience mostly in embedded software you'll never get so much as an email from them.
Admin
Our entire company still runs on a AS/400.
Admin
When the IBM 360 series came out in the 1960's, there was a, um, significant delay in the delivery of the operating system. (Afterwards, the project manager explained what went wrong in the book "The Mythical Man Month". Never hire a manager for a large project that hasn't read it.) So they whipped up an emulator for earlier, much less powerful IBM mainframes, for their customers to use in the mean time. A decade after the 360 OS was released and debugged (more so than any Windows release ever, IIRC), there were still companies running everything on that emulator.
Now, that's a main frame.
Admin
The timing of this is perfect. I have been struggling to revive a PC with ISA slots and load it with Windows 98, to run a program that appears to have been written in Turbo C, and control an In-Circuit Tester that was probably built in the 1980's. We have five of these Z1800-series testers, each bought reconditioned at a lower cost than the annual support on a new (and very incompatible) ICT machine. The machines just keep going, but keeping the computers running is increasingly challenging. The software upgrades stopped in 1998. Most of the control computers used an ISA card with a variant of the SCSI bus to link to the machine, so it's not as ancient as the AS/400, but the PC's weren't built to last.
Admin
An AS-400 is not ancient.... This is our server:
http://ds-wordpress.haverford.edu/bitbybit/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Chapter_4-127.jpg
Admin
I don't get it.
Admin
There's no cornify in this. I'm disappointed, Remy Porter.
Admin
Ick... could be worse, GenRads used to run on VAX many years ago. Still, between finding spare parts for the machine and fighting well worn test fixtures, you'd be much better off getting a conversion to a new "big iron" ICT. I'm sure your management isn't going to shell out the dough. Just stay well away from the 3070... what a nightmare.
Ironically, my AS/400 experience goes back to my early days a a CM with a variety of ICT equipment.
Admin
I longing back to these reliable machines from the past. Worked on HP-3000 machines for a while. Uptimes counts in months of even years. HP-3000 came 1973 and end of life was 2012. Worked on Dec-20 with TOPS-20. Many OSes (linux) still not have many of the features present in those days. The command line completion of TOPS-20 was fantastic. It expanded command parameters with extra comments. I find Windows less reliable and Unix (Linux) also needs reboot now and then.
Admin
Boring story. Only thing that might have been good about it would have been unicorns, but I guess sponsored stores aren't allowed to be cornified. :(
Admin
That was awful overacting, bad writing, and an milquetoast funny ending. All in all, your average video here!
Admin
Not Cornified, just corny.
If TDWTF hadn't jumped the shark before, it certainly has now.
Admin
... then they've probably used an ATM or a POS device or an elevator or most appliances and think people working on embedded software are generally awful.
Admin
I was joking about how literally every mention of "Hired" is accompanied by a link to their site, plus numerous other links. I'm starting to suspect their sponsors will threaten to pull out if their names are mentioned just one time without an appropriate link.
But I'll keep what you said in mind regardless :)
Admin
I miss my MicroVAX. I loved that machine.
Admin
Well, at least we know now that Remy Porter can portray a crazy guy flawlessly. We just have to hope he was actually acting during the video.
Admin
Now we know what he means when he says he's become a highly-paid consultant. XD
Admin
Uptimes of months or years is unusual? I routinely come across Windows severs that have been running for well over a year, sometimes multiple years, which is a good sign that patching them is going to be "fun." It's par for the course for small businesses that want to buy a server and ignore it forever.
If it wasn't for the fact that we've had to come to terms with the fact that EVERY system more than a few months old is vulnerable to some kind of remote exploit, Windows has long since met IBM and Unix in long uptimes. No matter what you run, exposing them for more than a few months is professional negligence.
Admin
Uptimes of months or years is unusual? I routinely come across Windows severs that have been running for well over a year, sometimes multiple years, which is a good sign that patching them is going to be "fun." It's par for the course for small businesses that want to buy a server and ignore it forever.
If it wasn't for the fact that we've had to come to terms with the fact that EVERY system more than a few months old is vulnerable to some kind of remote exploit, Windows has long since met IBM and Unix in long uptimes. No matter what you run, exposing them for more than a few months is professional negligence.