On 2025-10-20, Warp 4 <KLYNTAR!Warp.4@vert.synchro.net> wrote:

On 05 Oct 2025, phigan said the following...

Re: What is UNIX? (was: Hot T
By: Dumas Walker to FUSION on Fri Oct 03 2025 10:17 am

I was a professional user of z/OS until recently. ;) I used several

What's that run on?

Ibm IBM Z-Series mainframes like the IBM Z/16 Enterprise.

... Electricity is really just organized lightning.

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Damn, I'd love to start with as/400, because I can't grasp the
concept of objects and libraries and the like. It's like a
weird VMS/NT to the extreme. Yes, I'm learning Cobol because
of an $JOB. For the rest I can just use GCobol for prototyping
and perfectly fine under my OpenBSD netbook; but in order
to get employed I truly need at least to know the basics of
AS/400.
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anthk wrote to Warp 4 <=-

Damn, I'd love to start with as/400, because I can't grasp the
concept of objects and libraries and the like. It's like a
weird VMS/NT to the extreme. Yes, I'm learning Cobol because
of an $JOB. For the rest I can just use GCobol for prototyping
and perfectly fine under my OpenBSD netbook; but in order
to get employed I truly need at least to know the basics of
AS/400.

Good Luck learning Cobol. I haven't touch that since college. In
a wierd way, I wish I still had my textbooks on it. Hell I wish
I still had my old books on Pascal. I've been thinking about
relearning that just fun.



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Re: Re: What is UNIX? (was: H
By: nblade to anthk on Wed Jan 14 2026 08:21:00

I wish I still had my textbooks on it. Hell I wish I still had my old books on Pascal.

Check out Archive.org. Lots of old books there.

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nblade wrote to anthk <=-

Good Luck learning Cobol. I haven't touch that since college. In
a wierd way, I wish I still had my textbooks on it. Hell I wish
I still had my old books on Pascal. I've been thinking about
relearning that just fun.

Thriftbooks.com is a great place for old (and new) texts. I just picked
up Numerical Recipes in Pascal out of a sense of nostalgia, was
debating about playing around with Turbo Pascal again.



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Re: Re: What is UNIX? (was: H
By: anthk to Warp 4 on Tue Jan 13 2026 04:40:22

Damn, I'd love to start with as/400, because I can't grasp the
concept of objects and libraries and the like. It's like a
weird VMS/NT to the extreme. Yes, I'm learning Cobol because
of an $JOB. For the rest I can just use GCobol for prototyping
and perfectly fine under my OpenBSD netbook; but in order
to get employed I truly need at least to know the basics of
AS/400.

Libraries are more like... a tag for other objects? Not really a
folder, but works as such to some extent. I was taught AS/400 is
a big database, so that sounds the closest. Every object can be
assigned to only one library, libraries can't contain others
(with an exception of QSYS, which is a "master library").
So, a folder, but not really a folder. In FTP it's "translated"
to a directory so it's more acceptable for PCs.

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Neko wrote to anthk <=-

Libraries are more like... a tag for other objects? Not really a
folder, but works as such to some extent. I was taught AS/400 is
a big database, so that sounds the closest. Every object can be
assigned to only one library, libraries can't contain others
(with an exception of QSYS, which is a "master library").
So, a folder, but not really a folder.

There were some interesting data architectures out there in the 80s and
90s. my first job was programming and administering a PICK system, and
it took a while to get my head around it. The file system was the
database, and each field could be a list of other fields. A database
query language and BASIC were included in the OS.

You'd see the same sku record in a purchase order reflected as a value
in an inventory record, which was reflected in a sales record and in
the general ledger.

It's all well and good until you have a hardware or write error. They
called them GFEs, group format errors. Or, as we called them, Gone For
Ever.

We lost power and backup in the earthquake of 1989 and rebuilding was
pain in the ass. We basically had to restore the entire system from the
night before and lose a days' worth of records which we had to manually
enter.






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Re: Re: What is UNIX? (was: H
By: poindexter FORTRAN to Neko on Fri Jan 16 2026 08:16 am

There were some interesting data architectures out there in the 80s and
90s. my first job was programming and administering a PICK system, and
it took a while to get my head around it. The file system was the
database, and each field could be a list of other fields. A database
query language and BASIC were included in the OS.

A friend/bandmate/mentor/co-sysop of mine worked at General Automation (GA) in the late 80s where the target OS was PICK and the development environment was UNIX (of some kind). He was writing boot firmware (the "executive") for a 68040 based system that never shipped, I guess.
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