Silverlake Archives

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, …
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The Time Is Now To Get A GenAI Strategy

March 18, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

I was born a little less than a year after IBM launched its venerable System/360 mainframe platform, arguably the first information technology platform ever created and sold at scale. I graduated from college six months after the AS/400 was launched and was the founding editor of this newsletter you are now reading a little more than a year after Silverlake came to market and showed what a real platform could look like.

I was present during the Unix revolution, the client/server revolution, the commercial Internet revolution, and the big data revolutions, and I was absolutely at the forefront of commercial …
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Three IBM i Vendors Who Are Still Announcing Things in 2019

December 11, 2019 Alex Woodie

It’s that time of year when the holidays beckon and work starts to slow. We notice that here at IT Jungle, as the fruitcake deliveries heat up and the pace of news comes to a grinding halt. Here are three IBM i software vendors that aren’t letting the calendar get in the way of making announcements.

The fun starts out with Raz-Lee Security, the Nanuet, New York, company, which unveiled a pair of new IBM i security software bundles last week. What’s more, it is also offering discount pricing for those who act fast.

The first bundle, the …
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The Next Performance of Dawn May

September 26, 2018 Alex Woodie

Growing up on a farm in southern Minnesota, Dawn May had dreams of moving to the big city. But life has a funny way of changing the best laid plans, and May ended up spending decades working at IBM’s lab in nearby Rochester. After retiring from Big Blue earlier this year, May is set to start the next phase of her career as an independent consultant.

May moved out of Rochester in 2011, but even then, she never expected to stay in southern Minnesota for so long. “As a farm girl, I always wanted to move away and become a …
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Former IBMer’s New Book Puts The Midrange In The Spotlight

The Time Is Now To Get A GenAI Strategy

Three IBM i Vendors Who Are Still Announcing Things in 2019

The Next Performance of Dawn May

Content archive

Recent Posts

Subscribe

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Search