Inside the AS/400
by Frank G. Soltis · first published 1996
17mentions
8recommended by
9HN commenters
2014–2025first – last mentioned
89% recommend11% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Insider account of the AS/400 and its System/38 predecessor by an original designer; explains the unique architecture, single-level storage and built-in relational database. Suits readers of computer architecture.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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That looks great, too bad it's currently $80 used! I really enjoyed Soltis' more formal "Inside the AS/400"[1], available for a mere 77¢! [1] http://smile.amazon.com/Inside-AS-400-Frank-Soltis/dp/188241...
on “Welcome to the public AS/400” ↗I never used the i series (formerly AS/400, and System/38 before that), but reading Inside the AS/400 by Frank G. Soltis made a huge impression on me. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the details.
on “What have we lost? – Demo of exotic OSes (2021) [video]” ↗i Series (System/38, AS/400) is very interesting to learn about, even today. "Inside the AS/400" book by Frank G. Soltis is good, "AS/400: Designed for the Cloud" video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dTZVyRDnds) is inspiring, and "Laughing Boardroom" commercials series aren't bad either.
on “Four DB2 Code Bases?” ↗Thanks for all those technical details! For anyone else who'd like a broader tour around the AS/400, I can recommend "Inside the AS/400: Second Edition" by Frank Soltis. I bought it used for just a few dollars and really enjoyed learning about the evolution of the platform from one of its original designers, even though I doubt I'll…
on “Games for IBM AS/400” ↗The single-level store started with Soltis' System/38 in the 1970s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/38 I really recommend Frank Soltis' Inside the AS/400 if you are interested in computer architecture and virtualization.
on “Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor” ↗…file was implicitly mmapped, or alternatively, the processes's memory was just another file. Don't forget IBM System i (AS/400), which has a single persistent address space for everything. Frank Soltis' Inside the AS/400 is an interesting read.
on “Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods (2013)” ↗As an amateur OS nerd by 'exploring' do you mean use or read about or both? :) You can get free access to play around on an IBM i (aka AS400/iSeries/i5) here [0]. Archive.org has (for the moment) Inside the AS/400 [1] by Frank Soltis. He was the father of the System/38 /AS400, and also worked on the Cell processor. I haven't read this edition, but I did read the following edition called 'Fortress Rochester', and…
on “Unix-like OS in Rust inspired by xv6-riscv” ↗Here's a link to Inside the AS/400 by Frank Soltis, one of the lead designers. It's an interesting introduction to the AS/400, up to the POWER transition. There's also Fortress Rochester by the same author that goes into the iSeries…
on “Pub400.com – Your public IBM I 7.5 server” ↗Inside the AS/400 by Frank Soltis, is a deep dive into IBM's AS/400 and its predecessor the System/38. Quite interesting. There is a 2nd or 3rd edition called Fortress Rochester: Inside the iSeries, but it tends to be…
on “The Soul of an Old Machine” ↗Correct, although I can't be sure I'm remembering the names of the parts correctly. Soltis's book Inside the AS/400 https://archive.org/details/insideas4000000solt is fascinating reading, but the title overpromises rather badly; there is no list of opcodes, for example.
on “Fil's Unbelievable Garbage Collector” ↗The book "Inside the AS/400" has some really cool exposition on the unique aspects of the AS/400. If I remember right, the disks and memory are in a single address space, and of course, there is a relational database built in to…
on “Apple’s Bitcode Telegraphs Future CPU Plans” ↗If only.. There's Inside the AS/400[0] available on the Internet Archive, which is a great introduction to the system. Pub400 has free accounts for playing around with. But it's not the same as having your own system. [0] https://archive.org/details/insideas4000000solt/…
on “Below MI – IBM i for hackers” ↗…processors, IBM added extensions for OS/400 called PowerPC AS[0], and uses some "magic" to store a tag bit in the ECC bits of standard RAM. Also, "Fortress Rochester" by Frank Soltis (the follow up to Inside the AS/400) gives a detailed look at the differences compared to other systems. [0] https://www.devever.net/~hl/ppcas
on “Games for IBM AS/400” ↗…they are on disk or in RAM is transparent to higher layers, i.e. if an object isn't in ram it will page it in.. The designer of System/38 etc. Frank Soltis wrote a couple of interesting books on it - Inside The AS/400 and its 2nd edition Fortress Rochester: Inside the iSeries. They're out of print and expensive unfortunately, I wish I hadn't gave my copy away.
on “Inferno-OS: distributed operating system where everything is a file, with 9P” ↗…had some rather high-level features which POWER lacks, such as hardware multitasking, and knowledge of the basic structure of the 128-bit capability/single-level-store addresses. Source: Frank Soltis, Inside the AS/400, 1996
on “The legend of “x86 CPUs decode instructions into RISC form internally”” ↗