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Modernizing the RPG Reputation
February 19, 2008 Dan Burger
… Read moreRPG development is not what it appears to be. Or maybe it is. There are at least two ways to look at it, and whether the glass is half full or half empty depends on where you sit and perhaps what you are sitting on. For some people it’s like sitting on a comfortable old sofa. They don’t want to get up. For others, it’s more like sitting on a tack. They don’t stay seated for very long and they have a lot to say.
What it is and what it isn’t is the subject of many truths, half-truths, and
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IBM i 7.6 Brings More Security Improvements Than Just MFA
April 14, 2025 Alex Woodie
Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is the big headliner with IBM i 7.6, which IBM begins shipping at the end of the week. This is good and right, since IBM i customers have been begging IBM to add MFA to the platform for so long. But the new IBM i release brings several other major security enhancements that customers will appreciate too, including a new command to disable non-secure connections, new encryption algorithms, streamlined regulatory compliance, and an easy way to tell what security patches have been applied, among others.
IBM has made it clear that it is taking security seriously on …
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Fresche Nabs Redbourn Business Systems For Synon Expertise
November 11, 2024 Alex Woodie
Fresche Solutions last week acquired Redbourn Business Systems, a UK-based provider of Synon and CA 2E development and consulting services. The move bolsters Fresche’s previous efforts to cater to the needs of IBM i shops that adopted the Synon/2E development language, and also bolsters the company’s European presence.
Redbourn Business Systems was founded in 1994 by Steve Cast, a longtime RPG programmer and IBM midrange professional who was among the first to port applications from the System/38 to the AS/400 back in the 1980s. The company, which is based in the English village of Redbourn, provides a range of services …
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RPG Code Assist Is The Killer App For AI-Enhanced Power Systems
October 23, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
“I love it when a plan comes together.” – Colonel John “Hannibal” Smith, The A Team.
Look, we take our wisdom and our joy where we can find it here at The Four Hundred, and it does indeed look like Big Blue has a plan that is coming together with regards to generative AI and the Power Systems hardware platform as it relates to the IBM i software platform.
We told you in Monday’s issue that IBM was up to something with regard to the Power Systems line, which was revealed to partners and presumably key …
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IBM Previews New Power Tech At TechXchange Event
October 21, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
I wish we could tell you what was up, but we don’t know what it is. But we do know that all of the top tech brass at Big Blue related to the Power Systems platform are going to be participating in the keynote address at IBM’s TechXchange 2024 event in Las Vegas – what we used to call PartnerWorld – on Tuesday.
Like a bad AI model with not enough parameters and not enough data broken down into tokens, we have to try to infer from first principles what IBM might be announcing and therefore what we might see …
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Some Thoughts On Big Blue’s GenAI Strategy For IBM i
August 12, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In a world that has gone half mad with generative AI, it is refreshing to see the people who control the IBM i platform being skeptical, hopeful, and practical about how the technology might be used to help the companies who choose Power Systems running IBM i as the platform for their mission critical applications.
IBM Rochester has always been practical and often innovative when it comes to adopting hardware and software technologies, so the strategy that IBM i chief technology officer Steve Will laid out in a recent IBM i & AI – Strategy & Update as part of …
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How To Contribute To IBM’s GenAI Code Assistant For RPG
July 15, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back in October 2023, IBM launched its “Project Hopper” Watsonx Code Assistant for Z, which as the name suggests is a programming assistant that will eventually be built into the open source VS Code integrated development environment that was created by Microsoft and that is being explicitly trained to help programmers take applications coded in COBOL and convert them to Java. We speculated back then about how LLMs and GenAI might be used to do similar – and different – things for the IBM i platform, and back in May at the POWERUp 2024 conference Steve Will, the chief …
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IBM Developing AI Coding Assistant for IBM i
May 22, 2024 Alex Woodie
During his keynote presentation at the POWERUp 2024 conference Monday, IBM i CTO Steve Will announced that IBM is actively exploring ways to incorporate generative AI into the IBM i platform. The most promising of three individual but related projects is a plan to build a large language model (LLM)-powered coding assistant for IBM i that will initially provide three functions to support RPG development, with more expected in the future.
The genesis of the coding assisting project for RPG, which doesn’t have a name yet, can be traced to last year’s launch of watsonx Code Assistant for Z, which …
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IBM i Development Is Getting A Fresche Start With Some Ground-Breaking Subscriptions
November 27, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Cash flows into and out of a business, and capital expenditures are always interrupting those flows. They are yanked out of the revenue streams and depreciated over long periods of time, meant to reflect the value these expenditures deliver. In most cases in the IBM midrange, the machines sit around longer than the depreciation schedule the accountants use, and that is perceived as a kind of free money when it is really a kind of mounting technical debt as machinery and the software that runs upon it fall behind both technically and economically.
Eventually, the technical debt bill always comes …
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With Fresche’s New CEO, There Are No Problems, Just Solutions
August 16, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Joe Zarrehparvar was just finishing up his first 100 days as president and chief executive officer at Fresche Solutions when the company has begun its transition to a new subscription licensing model and when he finally had enough time in the job to sit down and talk with us about where IBM i customers, and therefore Fresche Solutions, would be going under his stewardship.
Zarrehparvar has a long and varied career in the IT industry, which started with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and electronics from the Manchester College in England and a master’s degree in engineering management from …
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