Is it safe to say the AS/400 is the IBM Future Systems project?

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Much has been written about IBM’s Future Systems project of the early 1970s. The most notable claims are the single level store and the high-level ISA that had things like database operations as part of the basic machine. The project is also universally described as a massive failure.

Now I have precisely zero IBM experience, so maybe I’m reading all of this wrong, but it seems like the AS/400 pretty much includes all of the key features of the FS systems. It has the DB build in, a higher level interface that lets you use all of these features, and a single level store.

So am I correct in thinking that the FS was actually an enormous success, and it just took some time to emerge?

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I think FS influenced the development of the AS/400 but the project died a long time before the AS appeared.

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The wikipedia article about the FS explains that the single store idea was indeed included in the System/38 and later the AS/400 but that the other half of the project (direct implementation of a high level language) was never tried again.

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Well I wrote the Wiki article, so I’m not sure I entirely trust it!

So on the AS/400, did you not have all of the things like DB2 and similar high-level bits as “part of the OS” by some definition? Were these not what IBM referred to as objects?

If so, how did one access these in code? Was it normal APIs you would import?

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5

I hope someone who knows can answer that.

My knowledge of the System/38 came from an interesting book a friend had where each chapter was a different computer architecture (one about the Xerox Alto, another about the Symbol, etc). I had to read it quickly and give it back to him and this was in the late 1980s.

My knowledge of the AS/400 came from an attempt by IBM to donate one to the university I was teaching at in 1994. Their only demand was that all relevant courses be restructured to focus on that machine. They liked to claim that the AS/400 was truly “open” and that Unix was not open at all. So I asked them for material they had that I could compare with books and such available on Unix. Based on what they said I recommended not accepting the donation (but left the university soon after and so don’t know what they did) since I thought it would be essentially a black box and that wouldn’t have any educational value (perhaps vocational training).

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