Memories of my AS/400 and OS/400 days: PUB400.COM – Your public IBM i server
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/22
[Wayback/Archive] PUB400.COM – Your public IBM i server:
What is PUB400.COM?
- A free and public Server running IBM i 7.5 for everyone
- You can create your own user profile, you have 400MB of disk storage and two private libraries
- You can program in CL, RPG, SQL, COBOL, train your skills and start learning about the best server operating system ever :)
- Create your own programming projects, you can even use node.js or other web technologies (contact us for http settings)
- An average of 25 new users per day! Great IBM i community!
PUB400 community rules
- Anyone can create a user profile (see below)
Do not create multiple users or try to run commercial environments- There will be a hard restriction on number of connections from a single IP
- There will be a hard setting on excluding other users from a user library
- There will be no regular backup, and there will be no guarantee that this system is online if you need it
- This system is a playground. But it will not be a place to make business without the efforts…
At the time of writing it was running IBM i 7.5 (which used to be known as OS/400 and i5/OS).
A trip down memory lane:
- AS/400 (later renamed iSeries, System i, then merged with System p into IBM Power and renamed IBM Power Series) with OS/400 releases V4R1, V5R3 and 7.1
- CL (Control Language)
- COBOL
- MQSeries (later renamed WebSphere MQ and now IBM MQ)
- RPG
- SQL on DB/2 (later renamed DB2 now Db2)
Via [Wayback/Archive] Angrynerds 098 – Proefpoepen – YouTube (around the 1:50:00 mark), thanks [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen (@kwootman) / Twitter (formerly [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Baten (@JeroenBaten) | Twitter) and other AngryNerds.
Related: [Wayback/Archive] IBM Cloud to debut mainframes-as-a-service for test and dev • The Register
Related blog posts
- Delphi “Variant Records”, a few notes
- WebSphere MQ errors I encountered.
- Crap: the outsourcing party of the client wrote C-code like this in 2005, and nobody scrutinized it
Unrelated fun from the same podcast:
- [Wayback/Archive] Zach Holman on Twitter: “The /r/ubiquiti subreddit has been going back and forth the last few days on who can make the shortest ethernet cable and it’s been seriously cracking me up.”
- [Wayback/Archive] Parker Reed on Twitter: “@holman Well I guess I can’t take this claim anymore”
–jeroen
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
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