Happy 20th Birthday, AS/400!
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

This week, and probably into next, IBM, its partners, and its customers will be celebrating the 20th birthday for the AS/400 system, which came to market on June 21, 1988. It has been an incredible--and sometimes unbelievable--two decades for the venerable OS/400 platform, whose roots go back a decade earlier to the System/38, the first integrated system in the world with a relational database and easy-to-use programming language designed for people who speak business, not assembler or C or some other alien computer language. READ MORE >

The Power 595 Takes the Top TPC-C Benchmark Ranking
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is a goal of all the makers of big iron boxes to push the performance envelope, and not just because vendors have big egos--oh, they certainly have those--but because their customers are always pushing them to push the performance envelope a little further. Sometimes, a lot further. For the past six years, the cold war in the big iron space has been especially intense between IBM, the Unix upstart and proprietary system leader, and Hewlett-Packard, the Unix stalwart and Windows and Linux upstart with a smattering of proprietary big iron. READ MORE >

The World Can't Get Enough Disk Array Capacity
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

While processors have hit a gigahertz wall somewhere around 3, 4, or 5 gigahertz, depending on the chip architecture, forcing chip makers to shift the use of Moore's Law advances in chip manufacturing to multicore devices to pack more capacity into a single slice of silicon, disk makers have not, thus far, hit a capacity wall on drives. And as far as anyone can tell, the appetite for gigabytes just keeps on growing and growing. It is really quite astounding, especially when you consider the amount of garbage that must be stored on computers the world over. READ MORE >

Mad Dog 21/21: iPhone Home
by Hesh Wiener

What did the extraterrestrial called ET in the eponymous 1982 Spielberg film use to save itself from a cadre of government agents? A phone. Twenty years later, people routinely phone home and everywhere else from anywhere. This hasn't distracted the technologists caught up in arguments about thin versus thick clients, but now there's a new Apple iPhone. It might ring loudly enough to be heard above the bickering advocates of various clients. A client as well as a phone, it could shift the focus of the user interface debate from technological means to budgetary goals. READ MORE >