Former IBMer’s New Book Puts The Midrange In The Spotlight

June 22, 2026 Alex Woodie

Over the years, there have been an untold number of books written about IBM and its computing legacy. (Our founding editor, TPM, has most of them in his library.) But very few, if any, of them focus much time on the line of midrange servers that came out of Rochester, Minnesota, including the AS/400, which turned 38 years young yesterday. That void is what drove former IBMer Bill Shaffer, who spent his entire career in the midrange, to write the book IBM & Computing.

Shaffer spent 40 years at IBM, beginning as a programmer working out of the Miami, …