Teaching myself IBM i, or trying
I’ve been a professional programmer for about 30 years now. I started out as a mainframe (or, midrange) operator on an IBM System/38 system in the early 90s, so I got exposed to IBM systems that way. I remember that they did everything there in IBM RPG, so I did get to see some RPG code there.
Prior to that, I had programmed in BASIC on several 8-bit home computers, and Turbo Pascal on my PC clone.
Since that first job, I’ve done all web programming (server-side) in things varying from ASP, PHP, Java, Python, Ruby and Clojure. I decided to finally learn something different, so I signed up on pub400.com to get access to an IBM i system, and play with COBOL and RPG-LE.
A couple of weeks later, I acquired a used IBM POWER 720 system on eBay, for only $200. It has 64 GB of RAM in it, and no hard drives so no OS. I’ve been working to get that server setup from scratch. It’s wildly different from PC hardware, even if it’s in a similar 4U rack setup of my Linux server.
Follow along here to see my progress, both successes and failures.