[rescue] AS/400 question

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

On Thu, Jun 05, 2003 at 05:47:11PM -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:
> On Thursday, June 5, 2003, at 05:34 PM, vance at neurotica.com wrote:
> >>   I meant the kind of info that'd be required to port a free
> >>OS...architecture specs, hardware FAQs, how to get one from a surplus
> >>house and get it running, etc.  IBM will *never* publish info like 
> >>that.
> >
> >IBM publishes the assembler programming guide for these machines.  That
> >should help, no?  It contains info on the instruction set, including
> >formats and indirection, firmware specs, and stuff like that.
> 
>   They do?  Why did the Linux guys have such a hard time finding it?  
> They eventually gave up, from what I read.

As far as I know, programming assembly on an AS/400 is at a fairly high
level, believe it or not.

You are actually programming a virtual machine of sorts, on top of the
real OS and hardware.

At least, that's how I've understood the S/38 and AS/400 systems.


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