With another year almost in the books for the IBM i community, we thought it was time to reminisce on the top stories of 2016. Security vulnerabilities, hacked AS/400s, blockbuster acquisitions, new releases of the operating system, and major conferences all garnered their share of digital ink. Here’s a rundown on the top IBM i-related stories making news this year.

It started innocently enough, way back in. . .

January

. . .When we asked “what should you do with your spare CPWs?” After all, you can’t take ’em with you. But with so much processing oomph on those brawny

Legacy applications tend to outlive the predictions of their imminent demise. The trouble they cause can be costly, though, as maintenance and vanishing skills for out-of-date programming languages are problems. Modernizing applications remains a priority in many IBM midrange shops, where reuse of existing IBM i 5250 screens and RPG (and COBOL) code is being closely examined. Tools like Accelerator from Surround Technologies and Newlook from Looksoftware are getting attention, too.

The latest collaboration from these two software vendors results in the generation of an IBM i-based user interface that’s accessible from any desktop or mobile device with a browser.

IBM i shops that find it difficult to track the state of their backups across IBM and non IBM platforms may want to check out the latest product news from Rocket Software. Last week the company announced that its Servergraph Professional product now supports IBM i, thereby enabling customers to view BRMS backup status alongside that of other backup tools, like NetBackup and TSM.

Considering the amount of data stored by the average enterprise these days, it’s clear that backup has transformed into a major application workload in its own right. Ensuring the integrity of backups has always been

Did you ever have a run of terrible luck, when just about everything seemed to be going awry? You might be somebody who shrugs off mud spatters of misfortune. If so, you wouldn’t be Salman Rushdie, who has composed a whole world in which imps, the kind called jinns in Islamic mythology, pop up all over the place causing havoc and misery. His novel Two Years contains such a world, one that coincidentally might seem familiar to Virginia Rometty, whose spell at the helm of IBM has been marred by mayhem. Perhaps the jinns are picking on Ginni.

In

If you can say one thing about the AS/400 through IBM i community, it is one that demonstrates the longevity of ideas that are ahead of their time. IT Jungle, which has been publishing since July 2001, is one of the whippersnappers in this market, although The Four Hundred in various forms has been publishing since July 1989. And still, we are young.

It is with this long history in mind, which is so much shorter than the System/3 machines that came out in 1969, when many of us here at IT Jungle were either unborn or (comically) had