• Father, Son, & Co: Kisco Systems Drills Down On Security

  April 4, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Rich Loeber was a divisional IT manager for over 16 years before he founded Kisco Information Systems in June 1984, four years before the AS/400 was launched. The System/36 had just launched the year before, and the System/38 had been around and in production for a handful of years at that time. Loeber founded Kisco – presumable named after Mount Kisco, a town in the Hudson Valley in New York State – to offer data processing services to IT shops in the New York metropolitan area.

  Two years later, Kisco became an independent software vendor in the IBM midrange, and …

  Read more

• It Is Time To Take The 2022 State Of IBM i Survey

  March 21, 2022 Miranda VanHorn

  The market for IBM i platform – previously known as the AS/400, the iSeries, and the System i – has seen some remarkable changes over the last decade. New capabilities, including graphical user interfaces and support of open-source languages, have ensured that the platform is more than capable of supporting the needs of today’s businesses.

  The annual Profound Logic State of IBM i Modernization Survey looks at trends and attitudes that shape the IBM i modernization market. The data collected gives the entire community a better understanding of the current state of IBM i and the priorities of businesses with …

  Read more

• The State Of The IBM i Base 2022, Part Two: Upgrade Plans

  February 23, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is always good for the IBM i ecosystem when there are new machines on the horizon with new processors, a lot more performance, and much better bang for the buck. This is, in many ways, what has drive the System/3X, AS/400, and IBM i midrange business forward for more than four decades.

  But you have to admit, the kind of excitement that we used to have in the early years of the AS/400, when performance needs often outstripped what Big Blue – and indeed, any system supplier – could afford, is not prevalent in the IBM i base today. …

  Read more

• The Real IBM i Legacy Is The People

  February 7, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I will never for the life of me understand why the word “legacy” has such a bad connotation in the IT business when in all other aspects of life it means something good. We talk about legacy systems, usually systems of record, a lot here at The Four Hundred, because we are focused on the AS/400 platform and its successors over the past three and a half decades. But the applications – and the people who extend and support them – that run on modern IBM i iron and some vintage predecessor systems have a heritage that extends back …

  Read more

• The IBM i Cloud Just Got More Frictionless With Virtual Serial Numbers

  January 31, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If the cloud is to be successful, it has to do more than provide a new deployment and pricing model for IT organizations. It has to also maintain and retain some of the important practices in use by the IT department. One of the big disconnections between on premises IBM equipment and capacity sold in the cloud has been the serial number that identifies a machine, which is a kind of birth certificate and Social Security number for each box that comes off the IBM factory lines.

  That serial number is used to identify the machine for technical support purposes …

  Read more

• The Pivotal Year Ahead For Big Blue And IBM i Shops

  January 10, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When we look back on it many years from now, this year, 2022, will be a pivotal year in the history of the Power Systems platform from Big Blue, which was commercially significant starting in February 1990 when the RS/6000 was launched but which obviously traces its roots through the IBM i and OS/400 branches of the Power Systems family tree all the way back to the System/3 launched in July 1969 just 10 days after humans first landed on the moon.

  There are different kinds of pivot points in the history of the IBM midrange platforms, including the launch …

  Read more

• The Great Resignation Intersects Application Modernization And Digital Transformation

  January 10, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Depending on how you want to look at it, today is March 680, 2020, or January 10, 2022. It is too early to tell if it is actually a new year or just the penultimate one stretched out unnaturally by biological circumstance. We remain hopeful that 2022 will represent something of a return to normal, but we also know that we can never return to the way things were in 2019. Too many people have had too much time to think about their careers, and a very large number of people are considering job changes or have already jumped ship …

  Read more

• The IBM Sales Pitch For The Power E1080

  November 29, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been a long, long time since a lot of server customers needed to upgrade their machinery every time a new processor and a new system using it comes to market. Back in the early days of the AS/400 platform, customers on the cutting edge of modernizing their back office, manufacturing, and distribution operations often upgraded their machines once a year to add capacity as use cases for these mission critical systems expanded faster than Dennard scaling and Moore’s Law increases in CPU performance.

  These days, machines are installed and not upgraded or swapped out until one, two, or …

  Read more

• Expanding The Operating System Matrix For Power10

  November 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As enterprise platforms go, the Power Systems family of machines has had an expansive operating system support matrix. One of the reasons why the Power line has persisted – and its rivals at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Sun Microsystems did not – is that not only did IBM keep making enhancements to its proprietary AIX and OS/400/IBM i platforms, but two decades ago formally adopted SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux as alternative platforms.

  With the launch of the “Cirrus” Power10 processors in the enterprise-class “Denali” Power E1080 in early September, IBM continued its long practice of …

  Read more

• Guru: Flexible Interfaces

  November 1, 2021 Ted Holt

  The details are murky, it’s been eons ago. Probably the mid-1990’s. I was working on an AS/400 that ran a mixture of System/36 and native applications. I needed to call a program that had been written in the latest version of RPG from both S/36 RPG II and native RPG III (a.k.a. RPG/400) programs. I hope I’m remembering this correctly. It’s been so long.

  The problem I ran into was rooted in a numeric parameter. S/36 programs passed numeric parameters in zoned decimal format, whereas native RPG and CL programs used packed decimal. The called program defined the parameter as …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles