The RPG programming language is the favorite still of many young and old who toil in the IBM i environment. Amazingly, this language is pushing 50 years old. Though the IT world believes that RPG began with RPG I, there really was an RPG 0 in the pre-1960 era called FARGO, also known as 1401 (Fourteen-o-one) Automatic Report Generation Operation, and this was the immediate predecessor to RPG.

So FARGO was really RPG with a bad name and it was really RPG 0. IBM got the name wrong the first time out–as it seems it often does. The intention of

If you can keep track of the constantly modifying and remodifying trade-in and rebate deals that IBM is offering to customers of various Power Systems iron, you are probably doing a lot better than IBM’s own sales reps and its reseller channel, and you are definitely doing a lot better than me. There are several deals that all have the same basic shape that are running right now, and they are all aimed at giving customers who get new Power-based servers (or upgrade to them) some kind of deal. These deals keep getting tweaked, making it all that more confusing

In 11 days, IBM will officially stop selling SCSI disks for System i and Power Systems servers, leaving serial attached SCSI (SAS) and solid state drives (SSD) as the only option for internal storage on the platform. While support for SCSI disks will continue through 2010, storage experts recommend taking a hard look at external storage and storage area networks (SANs), not only for enterprise customers with big workloads, but mid sized shops, too.

If you’ve been reading this newsletter, IBM’s transition from SCSI to SAS drives for internal storage should come as no surprise. Since the launch of the

There are now 6.3 million people receiving unemployment benefits, the vast majority engaged in a desperate race to find work before the benefits run out. For many, like Daniel, with a family and a mortgage, at best unemployment offers a tenuous lifeline, easily stretched to breakpoint by the expenses of day-to-day survival. But having lost his home and family, maintaining his unemployment eligibility became even more of an imperative for Daniel.

What work he could find paid far less than his IT job and offered no benefits, but would strip him of his unemployment check. So Daniel entered the

Dave Hatch is a vice president and group director of technology research at Aberdeen Group. His team of researchers create and publish reports on business intelligence, a technology that has grown to include many technologies, processes, and disciplines. The reports are not specific to the IBM AS/400 and its progeny, but much of the information pertains to any platform and encompasses most business plans. A strategy for BI on the AS/400 can start right here.

Business intelligence describes the capability to create reports from data captured in a computer system. At least that’s how it used to be. It

As part of its Smart Analytics System announcement from a few weeks ago, Big Blue also talked a little bit–and I mean only a little bit–about another kind of business analytics hardware that it had cooking in its labs and factories and that would debut soon for its System z mainframes. And hopefully, this appliance, called the Smart Analytics Optimizer, will also soon be available for the Power Systems platform running i 6.1 (and AIX and Linux, if you care).

The Smart Analytics System is a stack of preconfigured Power 550 systems running AIX, parallel file systems, and InfoSphere

One of the problems with trying to gauge the economy is that there is a big lag between when statistics are gathered and then analyzed and evaluated in some kind of report that actually gets into your hands so you can try to see how it relates to you and what is going on around you. It is with this in mind that I bring the 2009/2010 IT Spending and Staffing Benchmarks from Computer Economics to your attention.

This behemoth of a report has 1,053 pages across 21 chapters, and it costs a whopping $9,995. But chapters are available on

I know that I have said this a few times in the past year in various stories The Four Hundred has done about nips and tucks in the Power Systems lineup, but SCSI disks for Power Systems and their predecessors are coming to the end of the line.

Like soon. Like next week, in fact. So if you have SCSI disks in your machines and you want to stick with that technology instead of moving to internal SAS drives and or enclosures that support SAS drives, you don’t have very long to buy SCSI disks from Big Blue. As you

IBM knows times are tough out there for every company (excepting possibly Big Blue and Google these days), and to that end it is offering some discounts on Software Subscription and Support contracts for Lotus and WebSphere Portal software.

The discounts came out last week in announcement letter 209-327, and here’s the deal with the Lock In With Lotus software offer. (You’d think software companies would be allergic to the words “lock in,” but what do I know?) If customers buy new licenses for a slew of Lotus or WebSphere Portal products and they agree to pony up the

Q&A with TVMUG’s Don Rima

In last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, I told you that Don Rima had started up a new midrange user group, the Tennessee Valley Midrange User Group, or TVMUG for short. We couldn’t get ahold of each other because of our crazy schedules, but chatted over email about user groups, the i platform, and Chattanooga.

Timothy Prickett Morgan: What on earth are you doing in Chattanooga, Don? Nothing against the place–I was raised a country boy myself–but you have been in the Washington, D.C., metro area for a long time.

Don