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  • You’re Only As Old As The Applications You Feel

    June 24, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    You didn’t actually think that we would have forgotten that Sunday, June 21st, was the 32nd birthday of the Application System/400, did you? Of course we didn’t forget.

    It was also Father’s Day and the first day of summer, and to be perfectly frank (Soltis), I got a new smoker from my wife and I spent the afternoon learning about the joys of hickory smoked barbeque ribs. It is a gift that just keeps giving, because I made about 40 pounds of meat in various kinds and flavors because I needed to try everything all at once. …

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  • Guru: SQL Checks For Control Breaks

    April 6, 2020 Ted Holt

    A control break occurs when the combined value of one or more fields changes from one row (record) to the next when reading a data set sequentially. I used to write RPG programs with control breaks often. Now that reports are less common, I write them less often, but that’s not to say I never write a program with control breaks.

    When I first learned to handle control breaks in RPG, I used the L1 through L9 level indicators. These worked wonderfully and fed my family for several years. When I moved from the System/36 world to the S/38 (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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  • Sometimes Even DIYers Need A Little Help

    October 7, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    If there ever was a crowd that liked to do it themselves, it is the IBM midrange. Well, probably more like half to two-thirds of the IBM midrange. But you know what I mean.

    These companies started programming way back in the 1970s with one of Big Blue’s System/3 or System 32, or System/34 machines, and moved on to the System/38 or the System/36. The former launched in 1978, a decade after the System/3 that started it all in Rochester, Minnesota, and the latter came out in 1983, five years before the AS/400. The machines had sophisticated batch and interactive …

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  • Automation For The Masses – Here Come The Bots

    October 7, 2019 Richard Schoen

    Have you ever heard of using a robot to assist in completing your daily work? Or maybe the concept of eliminating redundant manual data entry and re-keying of info you didn’t think was possible? Let’s talk about bots, as these software robots are known, and how they are coming to an IBM i shop near you and how your IT and business teams can leverage this technology to get work done more efficiently.

    Many people in the IBM i world have never heard of the acronym: RPA. RPA stands for Robotic Process Automation, the current buzz word for implementing software …

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  • Guru: Read a Data Area As a One-Row Table with SQL, Take Two

    August 26, 2019 Ted Holt

    Fifteen years ago, reader W.G. asked me about the possibility of treating a data area as a one-row table (a physical file with one record) in an SQL query. The question intrigued me because in my System/36 days, I had often wished that I could access the local data area (LDA) as a one-record data file in a query.

    Today, thanks to Scott Forstie and his team at IBM, I update my response to W.G. with more information. It’s not that the technique I presented in 2004 is outdated — it’s as relevant as ever — but that the fine …

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  • Guru: When %SCAN Isn’t Sufficient

    June 24, 2019 Ted Holt

    The RPG %SCAN built-in function is wonderful! I can still remember having to look for a string within a string using RPG II on System/36. What an ordeal that was! Yet in some situations %SCAN can’t do all I need it to do. In those cases, I rely on the power of SQL.

    One case where SQL comes in handy is when I need a case-insensitive scan. Instead of RPG’s %SCAN function, I use SQL’s LOCATE and UPPER functions, like this:

    dcl-s  Description  char(48);
    dcl-s  pos          int (10);
    
    exec sql
       set :pos = locate ('HAMMER', upper(:Description));
    

    If Description has the …

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  • Speaking The SQL Lingua Franca On IBM i

    June 3, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    No matter what the job is, we all start out somewhere that is pretty far from being an expert and we depend on our elders and mentors to help us learn all the tricks and get good at the work.

    So it is with the nearly ubiquitous database query language, Structured Query Language, or SQL for short. It started out in the head of IBMer Ted Codd back in 1969, which was coincidentally when the System/3 minicomputer launched and its successor many generations later, the System/38 in 1978, was the first IBM system and the first system in the world …

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  • Retranslation Could Boost Performance

    May 13, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    There are so many kinds of genius embedded into the IBM midrange line that it is hard to know where to begin when discussing all of these interconnected ideas and layers. But perhaps the simplest way to encapsulate them all is that the System/38 and AS/400 minicomputers and their follow-ons sought to abstract away and mask some of the more complex aspects of a modern system so that programmers could focus on business logic and system administrators could focus at a much higher level, too.

    One of the key differentiators of these IBM midrange platforms, and one of the hallmarks …

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  • Mad Dog 21/21: In Memory of Hesh Wiener

    April 29, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    “Stop complaining. The only thing worse than writing so many obituaries is having one written about you. Let me assure you.”

    If my friend and mentor, Hesh Wiener, were alive today, that is what he would say to me with a laugh. And of course, as always, Hesh, who had no intention of leaving this world quite yet, would have been right.

    We have suffered our share of losses in the IBM midrange in recent years, and here at The Four Hundred, the publication that Hesh created in the wake of the inaugural June 21, 1988, AS/400 announcements. Hesh …

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