We have an AS/400 (excuse me, iSeries) and the damn thing is rock solid. It also alerts us and IBM when it needs maintenance. Its basically a tank with a logistics chain.
Designed for business apps, future-proofing, integrated database, largely self-managing, capability-security, continuing on solid (POWER) hardware... did about everything right. That's why we regularly fix crashed Windows and 'NIX machines but my company's AS/400 has been running for around 10 years.
I've always wanted a modern, clean-slated version of the System/38 w/out relics from that time and with any tricks we've learned since. Throw in hardware acceleration for garbage collection and some NonStop-style tricks for fault-tolerance to have a beast of a machine.
A similarly amazing machine that IBM's System/38 learned from a little bit. Somebody posted a link to an emulator but honestly I don't want to dredge through that. Like you said, a modern system that reimplemented its best attributes without the limitations or baggage would be nice.
Mainframes are complex enough that there's rarely projects to implement them but there's lots of work on safer CPU's. See crash-safe.org's early publications for a CPU that combined Burrough's-style checks, Alpha ISA, and functional programming at system level. Given stack preference, you might like these:
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.
