The AS/400: A 37-Year-Old Dog That Loves To Learn New Tricks

June 23, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

In the early years of the AS/400 platform, when we were new to the IT business and there were so many different datacenter computing platforms and even more operating systems, we didn’t think about the longevity of the AS/400 and its System/38 and System/36 predecessors. It was a new platform with a heritage, a system with both a past and a future out as far as we could see with our own youth and limited experience.

But over the years, in the early 2000s in particular, we started to keep track of the years the AS/400 was around and celebrated its birthday every time it rolled around on June 21, which is also the summer solstice, of course.

All of us still working in the AS/400 and IBM i community have, at this point, as the AS/400 platform has evolved but is still nonetheless 37 years old, have been through an incredible amount of change in the IT market. And it feels like the rate of change in IT is accelerating once again as GenAI is consuming a lot of the oxygen, imagination, and budget in the IT department, with a certain amount of fear, trepidation, and hope tossed in. Maybe all of this accelerating change is just our brains moving slower as we age. Maybe things really are getting faster, too.

We don’t know if computer system years are like dog years, but if so, 37 actual years would be a very large number. Dogs age about seven years for the first six months of puppyhood, eight or so years for the next six months, then nine years for the second year, then four years of dog age for each real year after that. Bigger dogs age faster than smaller dogs on this scale, which means they tend to go the way of all flesh earlier. Being a mid-sized dog that can learn new tricks, and has many times of the years to the point that it has had many names – AS/400, AS/400e, iSeries, System i, and IBM i – the platform that this newsletter. If you do the math for a mid-sized dog, 37 years is 181 years in dog years. It is hard for a dog to be spry at that age, but it has been fairly easy for the IBM i platform.

Just look at all of the new technologies and techniques that the IBM i platform can and does absorb each year.

Age is a state of mind, we have learned over time, but it is also a matter of physicality. It is interesting to us, still after so many years, that the AS/400 persists when so many other platforms are gone. The world has really come down to Linux on X86 and Arm CPUs for new stuff like data analytics, Web infrastructure, HPC, and AI, with Windows Server being the only large-scale proprietary platform in high volume and the bulk of the rest of the machines out there in the datacenter (and representing a disproportionate share of revenues but not shipments) being comprised of MVS and z/OS on System Z and IBM i and AIX on Power Systems platforms. The rest is a smattering of legacy platforms like various Unixes from Oracle and Hewlett Packard Enterprise and things like OpenVMS and NonStop (also from HPE these days).

It has been a long time since a new operating system was announced and got some traction in the market, and we do not expect this situation to change. A lot of the innovation is happening at the layers above the operating system – server virtualization hypervisors, virtual storage and networking offloads, Kubernetes containers, AI frameworks and runtimes are the big ones.

That we have one that can support these technologies, or already have analogs that predate them, is significant. And that the IBM i platform can run with the young dogs and still be one of the big dogs is nothing short of amazing.

This Issue Sponsored By

Table of Contents

Content archive

Recent Posts

Subscribe

Pages

Search