• The Four Hundred
  • Subscribe
  • Media Kit
  • Contributors
  • About Us
  • Contact
Menu
  • The Four Hundred
  • Subscribe
  • Media Kit
  • Contributors
  • About Us
  • Contact
  • The Long Play

    June 21, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    Surprising things persist, and for good reasons. Around this time every year, when summer is officially beginning, I take a pause and think thankful thoughts about the AS/400 and its progeny, which trace back to the June 21, 1988, launch. I didn’t enter the market until a year later, as the cub reporter and one of the founding editors of The Four Hundred, my first real job out of college and one I still gladly hold.

    We have all been through a lot of change in 33 years, to be sure. The IT market is so different today from the data processing market the AS/400 entered, taking the best architectural ideas of the System/38, which was a decade old at the AS/400 launch and which was the first commercial relational database system in the world (ahead of Oracle but no one gives IBM credit here), and the System/36, which was a volume product with over 250,000 customers at the time, and wove them together into a coherent, modern platform that offered mainframe-class capability on a smaller scale and for a lot less money than mainframes cost and a huge portfolio of applications that were ready to roll on Day One.

    In our early years, we all feel immortal and living a long life is not even a concern. But at some point, as the years advance and we lose people or the market loses system suppliers, as the world around us changes, longevity goes from being unthought of to being taken for granted to being hesitantly expected to being celebrated. We are not talking about marking off the days on a calendar here – that is the saddest thing anyone could do – but more like raising a toast to the things that persist because of the values they embody and the value that people still derive from them. The AS/400 platform, which has been renamed several times in its more than three decades and which is now called the IBM i platform, is still valuable, and it has outlived many peers because it can keep alive old investments and transform them into each phase change in the IT market. We have never seen anything like it – perhaps Microsoft’s Word and Excel, perhaps Google’s eponymous search engine are akin to the AS/400 platform – and we suspect we will never see it again.

    Well, except maybe the vinyl revival, which is the persistence and now resurgence of 33 RPM “long play” or LP vinyl records, which occurred to me because of the synchronicity of the number “33.” I grew up in the vinyl record era is a household that had musicians – we had both kinds of music, country and western – who made car payments or parts of mortgage payments by playing live music in bars, clubs, and weddings as well a love of recorded music. By the time I was a young teenager, the market was shifting to 8-track tape and then cassette tape – truly inferior technology for the long haul – and by my late teens the market shifted to CDs. Since then, we have seen the rise of streaming music and the death of music stores. I don’t know about you, but I treated myself to a new record – I still call them records to the great amusement of my children – after each paycheck for many, many years. Somewhere in the 1990s, when I started to have kids, that stopped. And oddly enough, my oldest daughter has taken a shining to records in recent years. There is something to be said for liner notes and a substantial, physical manifestation of music. And many people are realizing this, and hence the vinyl revival, which started in 2007. While vinyl records only represent about 6 percent of music shipments, record sales are growing at an accelerating rate and the number of records being etched are now at levels we have not seen since the 1980s.

    Amazing, when you think about it. Record level access is being preserved in two different ways.

    With at, I wish the AS/400 a happy 33rd birthday and point out we could have spent a lot of time talking about the mystery of the “33” on the Rolling Rock beer bottle. But it just didn’t resonate.

    RELATED STORIES

    You’re Only As Old As The Applications You Feel

    A Platform Of A Certain Age And Respectability

    Big Blue Gives IBM i Shops A Special 30th Birthday Bash Box

    30 Years And Just Getting Started: IBM i Celebration Looks Ahead

    Seven Bright Spots To Ponder On The AS/400’s 29th Birthday

    Power Systems GM Weights In On AS/400 Birthday

    The AS/400 At 28: A HENRY, Not A DINK

    The AS/400 Turns 27, And Still Has Much To Teach IT

    Reader Feedback On The AS/400 Turns 27, And Still Has Much To Teach IT

    Still A Community Of Common Interest

    TFH Flashback: A Community of Common Interest

    Silver Anniversary For Silverlake

    Power System Tweaks Loom As IBM Offers 25th Anniversary Edition Iron

    The Big Two Four For The Four Oh Oh

    You’re Only As Old As The Programs You Run With

    The AS/400 at 22: Yesterday and Forever

    AS/400: Still Kicking After 21 Years

    IBM’s AS/400 20th Birthday Party Pictures

    The AS/400’s Grandfather Talks Past, Present, and Future

    Happy 20th Birthday, AS/400!

    The AS/400 at 19: Predicting the Future–Or Not

    Happy 18th Birthday, AS/400; Time to Leave the Nest

    The IBM Systems Agenda: iB(M)

    Happy 17th Birthday to the AS/400!

    The AS/400: 16 Years of Bending, Not Breaking

    Share this:

    • Reddit
    • Facebook
    • LinkedIn
    • Twitter
    • Email

    Tags: Tags: AS/400, IBM i, System/38

    Sponsored by
    PERFSCAN

    Revolutionary Performance Management Software

    At Greymine, we recognize there is a void in the IT world for a dedicated performance management company and also for a performance management tool that’s modern, easy to use, and doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. That’s why we created PERFSCAN.

    PERFSCAN is designed to make your job easier. With revolutionary technology, an easy-to-read report and graphics engine, and real time monitoring, tasks that used to take days can now take minutes. This means you will know your system better and will be able to provide better service to your customers.

    OUR FEATURES

    PERFSCAN is full of robust features that don’t require you to take a three-day class in order to use the product effectively.

    Customizable Performance Reporting

    Whether you are troubleshooting a major system problem or simply creating a monthly report, PERFSCAN lets you select any combination of desired performance metrics (CPU, Disk, and Memory).

    User Defined Performance Guidelines

    No matter if you are a managed service provider managing complex systems in the cloud or a customer analyzing your on-premises solution, PERFSCAN gives you the flexibility to define all mission critical guidelines how they need to be.

    Understanding The Impact Of Change

    Tired of all the finger pointing when performance is suffering? PERFSCAN’s innovative What’s Changed and Period vs. Period analysis creates a culture of proof by correlating known environmental changes with system performance metrics.

    Comprehensive Executive Summary

    Creating performance graphs is easy. Understanding what they mean is another thing. With one mouse click, PERFSCAN includes an easy-to-understand executive summary for each core metric analyzed.

    Combined Real-Time Monitor And Performance Analysis Tool

    With PERFSCAN’s combined built in enterprise real-time monitor and historical performance analysis capability, you will always know how your mission-critical systems are performing.

    Cloud Performance Reporting Is Easy

    Managing performance for production systems in the cloud can be a black hole to many system administrators. The good news is PERFSCAN analyzes all core metrics regardless of the location. That’s why MSPs and customers love PERFSCAN.

    Detailed Job Analysis

    PERFSCAN shows detailed top job analysis for any desired period. All metrics are displayed in two ways: Traditional Report and Percentage Breakdown Pie Chart. This toggle capability instantly shows the jobs using the most system resources.

    Save Report Capability

    Your boss lost the report you gave to him on Friday. Now what do you do? With PERFSCAN’s save report capability, any report can be retrieved in a matter of seconds.

    Professional PDF Reporting With Branding

    Creating professional looking reports for your customers has never been easier with PERFSCAN. Branding for our partners and service provider customers is easy with PERFSCAN.

    Check it out at perfscan.com

    Share this:

    • Reddit
    • Facebook
    • LinkedIn
    • Twitter
    • Email

    IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 25 Guru: Understanding Database Performance Using The Performance Data Investigator, Part 1

    Leave a Reply Cancel reply

TFH Volume: 31 Issue: 42

This Issue Sponsored By

  • Maxava
  • UCG Technologies
  • Profound Logic
  • Entrepid
  • Raz-Lee Security
  • Precisely
  • ARCAD Software

Table of Contents

  • IBM i Business Bucks The COVID Trend, Will Says
  • Don’t Forget About The Co-Lo Alternative To Cloud
  • Guru: Understanding Database Performance Using The Performance Data Investigator, Part 1
  • The Long Play
  • IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 25
  • Taking A Defense In Depth Strategy With IBM i
  • Get A Move On To Learn More About Moving To Git Source Control On IBM i

Content archive

  • The Four Hundred
  • Four Hundred Stuff
  • Four Hundred Guru

Recent Posts

  • Power10 Boosts NVM-Express Flash Performance
  • Fortra Completes Postmortem Of GoAnywhere Vulnerability
  • Guru: Binding Directory Entries
  • How Does Your Infrastructure Spending Stack Up To The World?
  • IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 22
  • Fortra Issues 20th State of IBM i Security Report
  • FNTS Launches Managed Services for Power Servers in IBM Cloud
  • Total LTO Shipped Capacity Up Slightly in 2022
  • Four Hundred Monitor, May 24
  • Update On Critical Security Vulnerability In PowerVM

Subscribe

To get news from IT Jungle sent to your inbox every week, subscribe to our newsletter.

Pages

  • About Us
  • Contact
  • Contributors
  • Four Hundred Monitor
  • IBM i PTF Guide
  • Media Kit
  • Subscribe

Search

Copyright © 2023 IT Jungle