[rescue] AS/400? Anyone?

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Fri, Jan 18, 2008 at 01:09:13AM -0500, Patrick Finnegan wrote:
> There is no such thing as a "native" AS/400 instruction set, 
> realistically.  AS/400s have always run a (specific to the machine it's 
> on) emulator to run "AS/400 code".
> 
> By your definition, AS/400s were "dead and gone" before the day they 
> first shipped.  This makes no sense.

Makes a lot of sense to me. :-) 

If you make the assumption that the AS/400 never ran anything else
than the emulator, or ran everything else under that emulator, then
it makes perfect sense. Microcoded machines have been around since the
early 1960's, this was just another one.

Since the RS6000 (and the POWER architechture) runs native code,
a native operating system, and can run that native code and
operating system very nicely without the AS/400 emulator,
then I would say they are RS/6000's or POWER computers,
not AS/400's.

Bear in mind they don't emulate the AS/400 native instruction set. If
you had a program written in it, you simply could not run it on anything
except an old machine.

You could not, as I understand it, boot the native AS/400 version of the
virtual machine on a POWER computer, you can only run the emulation of
the virtual computer it emulated. 

What makes it dead and gone in my book is that the native instruction
set, which at one time ran on a real computer is no longer supported
on anything. 

Even if no one outside of the development labs could access the "bare
metal", at one time it existed, someone could write programs for it and
they did.

Geoff.

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