• Sundry Interesting IBM i Announcements For You To Ponder

  April 23, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are still picking though the latest tweaks and changes to the IBM i platform that came with the April 8 announcements. We are still also working through our disappointment that there was not one single interesting hardware announcement from Big Blue relating to the Power Systems platform. We are having a bit of iron deficiency, it seems.

  First thing first, we noticed this week that the official Redbook for IBM i 7.6, which naturally enough is called IBM i 7.6 Features And Functions, has been published, and is jam packed with 215 pages of more details about …

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• Fresche Nabs Redbourn Business Systems For Synon Expertise

  November 11, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Fresche Solutions last week acquired Redbourn Business Systems, a UK-based provider of Synon and CA 2E development and consulting services. The move bolsters Fresche’s previous efforts to cater to the needs of IBM i shops that adopted the Synon/2E development language, and also bolsters the company’s European presence.

  Redbourn Business Systems was founded in 1994 by Steve Cast, a longtime RPG programmer and IBM midrange professional who was among the first to port applications from the System/38 to the AS/400 back in the 1980s. The company, which is based in the English village of Redbourn, provides a range of services …

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• IBM Begins the Purge of Old Greenscreen Utilities

  July 10, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM is prepping the IBM i community to prepare to adapt to some substantial changes that are coming with the next release of IBM i, including the end of support for a large swath of the Application Development ToolSet (ADTS) that ships with Rational Development Studio (RDS). Source Entry Utility (SEU) and Programming Development Manager (PDM) are not among the ADTS tools getting the boot, but that’s not stopping midrange professionals from speculating that their time in IBM i is limited, too.

  As part of its May 7 Technology Refresh for IBM i 7.4 and 7.5, IBM issued a “software …

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• 40 Years Of DB2, But Even More For That No-Name Database Embedded In The System/38

  October 2, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, Big Blue celebrated the 40^th anniversary of the launch of its Database 2 relational database management system for its venerable System/370, System 308X, and System/390 mainframes. It is now called Db2, because marketing people can’t leave anything alone, and even though we now have this thing called Db2 for i, IBM didn’t mention this red-headed stepchild of a relational database as part of its celebration.

  Not even once. And that’s just fine by us because the integrated relational database management system that has been the heart of our venerable System/38 and its progeny was never DB2/400 or …

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• Integrate 2023, The Lyrics

  June 26, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When I was at the POWERUp conference in Denver back in late April along with my co-editor, Alex Woodie, we were sitting in the opening keynote address when Alison Butterill, IBM i offering manager, and Steve Will, IBM i chief architect, were on stage talking about the AS/400 launch and how the platform has evolved over time, there was a point in the presentation when a slide went up that listed some of the key features of the platform. I remember seeing “Innovate” and “Integrate” at the top of the list, and that sent my brain down an internal monologue …

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• Talking System Architecture With The Frank Soltis

  June 21, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In a very funny way, the System/38 and its AS/400 and following progeny are the product of coincidence and brilliance. In 1962, had Frank Soltis taken that summer job at an aerospace company that he wanted to work for in Southern California, first of all, he might have ended up with a tan, and second of all, whatever followed the System/34 almost certainly would not have had single level storage, much less the architecture that we still know today, in modified form, as the IBM i platform.

  Lucky for us that Frank’s father, who ran a parts distribution operation for …

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• Happy Coral Anniversary, System/36 And System/38!

  June 19, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The AS/400 is the product of the marriage of the System/36 and the System/38 that had its first child delivered on June 21, 1988. So, to one way of thinking about it, the AS/400 is not just celebrating its 35^th birthday this week, but the System/36 and the System/38 are celebrating their Coral Anniversary. The rules of etiquette say that we have to send IBM Rochester something carved in jade to celebrate.

  The AS/400, which lives on as the IBM i platform running on Power10 hardware, is neither stuck on a coral reef nor jaded, but just going …

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• Situation Wanted

  March 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There have been a tremendous number of layoffs in the tech sector in the past several months, and we are grateful that the IBM i market is part of the economy but also somewhat set apart from the go-go tech sector that sometimes engages in irrational exuberance. But we also know there is a talent shortage and a skills gap in this IBM i market. The question is, what can we do about it?

  Well, The Four Hundred can do one simple and easy thing: We can start a Situation Wanted column, which are doing today to help get people …

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• The IBM i OS Base Is Older Than We Think, But Moving Ahead

  March 6, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Hardware upgrades are costly in terms of money and while it is always exciting to get a new system with that “new computer smell” – and you know what we are talking about – at least IBM i operating system and systems software upgrades don’t carry such a high price – provided you are on Software Maintenance and you do proper testing on your software before you make a jump to a new release.

  The other great thing about IBM i systems software is that any given release not only runs on the current new Power Systems hardware at the …

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• Bob Langieri Shares IBM i Career Trends Outlook for 2023

  February 1, 2023 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to career trends in the IBM i community, there are few who have a better sense of what’s going on than Bob Langieri. The longtime CEO of Excel Technical Services in Orange County, California, has his fingers on the pulse of the job situation, which is why we turn to him for an outlook on 2023 trends.

  The economy started out on a down note last year before picking up momentum towards the end of 2022, Langieri notes. Those forces are still with us today, the tea leaves are inconclusive.

  “A recession is defined as two consecutive …

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