System/32 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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Don’t Be A Blowhard

March 22, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

One of the things that made the AS/400 a great system, as well as the System/36 and the System/32 and System/34 before it, was that there were entry machines that had enough oomph to support the data processing and storage needs of small businesses within a reasonable budget and in a system that didn’t need a datacenter or even a data closet. They could be tucked under a desk, or left to run beside them.

Way back in the dawn of time, there were special machines, even smaller than the original AS/400-B10 and AS/400 -B20, that were even smaller and …
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The Distinguished Professionals Of IBM i

February 17, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We use the term legacy a lot in the IBM midrange and mainframe markets, and not necessarily in the good way we talk about political leaders or business executives or sports stars all leaving a legacy behind of their body of work. I use the term when it means something precise – legacy applications, for instance, are the ones that originated back in time and that have not been modernized in any substantial way because perhaps they don’t need to be.

I prefer the term vintage when I am talking about hardware and software releases because that conveys a …
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Are You Experienced? IBM i Users Weigh In

March 18, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We spend a lot of time here at The Four Hundred thinking about the vintage of the hardware, operating systems, and applications running on the IBM i platform and its forbears. But we are also concerned, as you know, with the vintage of the people who are running and programming the systems out there in the IBM midrange installed base.

It is hard to get any quantifiable data on the people out there running the platforms – and we thank you, as loyal readers of this publication for several decades now for being in this market for even more decades …
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Former IBMer’s New Book Puts The Midrange In The Spotlight

Don’t Be A Blowhard

The Distinguished Professionals Of IBM i

Are You Experienced? IBM i Users Weigh In

Content archive

Recent Posts

Subscribe

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Search