I started out my career in IT as an AS/400 operator / Netware 3.12 admin, and while AS/400 / iSeries aren't "en vogue" these days, I have a lot of respect for those machines. As you say, they are rock solid. One of the places I worked for had an even older machine, an IBM S/36 (predecessor to the AS/400) and while ancient, it just kept plugging away, day after day after day after day...
OTOH, you couldn't pay me to program in RPG/400 using SEU. Building menus, or playing around with a little CL on on the '400 is one thing. But RPG programming sucks. Well, it did anyway. Maybe things have gotten better. I understand the ILE stuff made RPG less column oriented and closer to a free-form language, but I had never had a chance to use that.
I remember original RPG as being the electronic descendant of the old IBM unit record machines, with their plug boards and mechanical processing cycles. That heritage likely predates even COBOL. IBM added many extensions over the years, and at one of my mainframe workplaces we even did online CICS programming with RPG (not fun at all!).
Who are you and how have you stolen my[1] early career history?!
Hahaha... well, it's a long story, regarding the early part of my career. Especially the whole bit about exactly how I got involved with AS/400's in the first place.
Let me guess you started in the early 90's, right?
Almost. I graduated H.S. in '91, started programming in '92 or so, but didn't start my first IT job until 1997.
OTOH, you couldn't pay me to program in RPG/400 using SEU. Building menus, or playing around with a little CL on on the '400 is one thing. But RPG programming sucks. Well, it did anyway. Maybe things have gotten better. I understand the ILE stuff made RPG less column oriented and closer to a free-form language, but I had never had a chance to use that.