Emrys said:
Well, hopefully I will be working with some iSeries machines soon.
And to answer my own questions, AS/400 or OS/400 more specifically isn't a UNIX at all. It is an object oriented OS. Sorta like where MS is going with Active Directory. Except that they have been doing it this way for a couple decades.
Pretty cool stuff.
Ahh, but under the hood there is still an AIX or Linux core, a bit like Apple have done with OSX and Darwin.
IBM have really taken the Open Source core thingy to heart and based all core services on a common set of low level code that owes much to Linux (but with an AIX flavour).
What you get to interact with at the higher level will not look much like unix but it is definitely in there somewhere.
AND you can of course throw the whole lot away and just download (from IBM) the Linux OS complete with Gnome or Conqueror, IBM are really being good to their customers these days. (i.e no proprietary you-must-buy-our-services **** unless of course you want it).
Just before I left IBM I took some e-learning packages which were aimed at professionals asked to install Linux on the 400 series machines, it all looked pretty straightforward.
If you want a really powerful server you can do a lot worse than a 400 running Linux & Apache.
Amen-Moses