Feeds and Speeds of the New System i5s
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

When IBM executives hinted that the System i5 product line in 2006 would greatly resemble the iSeries i5 line launched in 2004 and tweaked here and there in 2005, they weren't kidding. The packaging of the Value, Express, Standard, and Enterprise Editions of Power hardware and i5/OS software will look very familiar to the OS/400 customer base and reseller channels. In some ways, the product line has been improved, and in others, IBM still doesn't quite seem to understand the SMB server market. READ MORE >

System i5 V5R4 Software Announcement Roundup
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Whenever IBM does iSeries platform announcements, it takes a little while to get all of the information together about what it has done. Consequently, we take some time to go through the announcements in finer detail. In last week's announcements, which ran in Four Hundred Stuff because of an announcement embargo, I explained what the new i5 servers were all about and hit the high points of the i5/OS V5R4 announcements. This week, I want to cover a bunch of other interesting things IBM announced with the System i5 software stack. READ MORE >

IBM Weaves Together HATS and WebFacing Tools
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

While the World Wide Web interface to the Internet has been a wonderful thing for consumers and corporate end users alike, the radically different way of doing interfaces compared to traditional host machines such as OS/400, VMS, and mainframe systems has, to put it bluntly, caused a tremendous amount of trouble in the past decade. And while IBM and its partners have skinned this cat in what seems like a zillion clever ways, making RPG and COBOL applications speak Web is still a big hassle. READ MORE >

As I See It: Changing the World, One Pension at a Time
by Victor Rozek

It will sound improbable to people under 40 who have no memory of it, but not that long ago, families got by on the income of a single earner. One salary was enough to support a middle-class lifestyle. Back then, health care was actually affordable and the cost of health insurance wasn't the equivalent of a second mortgage. You could attend a state college for next to nothing, and graduates did not begin life buried under a mountain of debt. Entire careers were spent working for a single company with a secured pension at retirement. The middle class flourished. READ MORE >