30 Years of Innovation and we’re just getting started.

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June 21. 1988 was the birth of the longest living server on the planet. It was born in Rochester, Minnesota US – and the codename was taken from the local water pond: Silver Lake.

Officially it was called AS/400 with the Operation System named OS/400. The AS/400 was the follow-on server of the midrange server called System/38, that was created in Rochester back in 1979.

The AS/400 server has had many names during the years, iSeries, System i and finally IBM i, but the name AS/400, is the name most people knows and still call the server despite IBM for years and years have tried to make people understand that because the server has changed a lot together with the industry, the server is by far not what an AS/400 was back in 1988.

One of the main reasons for the success of the AS/400 has always been that it is so stable and almost run without people interference. The statement for the server has always been – Run your Business, not your computer. The major five strong areas for the OS are the Object security, Single Level Storage, Virtualized Work Management, TIMI (Technological Independ Machine Interface) and the Integrated environment.

Today the IBM i is running on IBM Power hardware, the exact same iron as IBM AIX and most of the Linux distributions.

Despite that the OS/400 has undergone so many improvements and transformations over the years, people are still able to run the exact same programs today, that they created back then in 1988. This possibility is partly the reason why some call the server for the ‘Green Screen’ machine because of the very useful green/black command line interface. Today most of the ‘Green Screen’ solutions have modernized or transformed into Web, Graphical or Mobile interfaces – and a lot of possibilities has been added to adapt to the Open Source community.

The major challenge for the IBM i shops today is staffing. AS/400 people are starting to be pensioned, and new fresh people are needed to take over.  Despite the server’s big success, AS/400 has all the years been the world’s best kept secret, so young people today do not know that they have a very good opportunity to get engagement in those shops, with the knowledge that they have from the universities. The reason for this possibility, is the Open Source languages and the modernization of the legacy language called RPG.

Together with the Power platform, the IBM i has a very long ongoing documented life plan. Today the IBM i runs on a POWER9 processor announced late 2017 with OS Version 7.2 or 7.3, and IBM has already began talking about POWER10 and the next version of the OS called ‘Next+1’. The stated plan at the moment goes to 2028 – but nothing seems to be in the way that it will be able to go on forever.

Thirty years of innovation – and we’re just getting started

Click here, to read more about 30 years of innovation.

For any further questions do not hesitate to contact me at: REX@dk.ibm.com