Another year milestone has been reached as I celebrate the 13th birthday of RPGPGM.COM. It has been an incredible personal journey since I have published that first post in 2013. Your feedback and encouragement have made all the effort I have spent worthwhile.
What has happened to me in the past twelve months?
This year's Fortra 2026 IBM i Marketplace Survey results has been published. This is the twelfth year of the survey, and I for one, always find it an interesting read to learn what the other members of the IBM i community are up to.
If you did not participate in this year's survey I would like to strongly encourage you to participate in the next, as it is a good insight as to what is important to people and companies using IBM i.
You can read it here.
You can also watch the discussion about the survey with Steve Will, IBM i CTO and Chief Architect, Tom Huntington, Fortra, Kris Whitney, IBM i Chief Engineer, Tomothy Prickett Morgan, IT Jungle, here.
Tomorrow, January 31, 2026, is the End of Support, EoS, for the small Power9 servers:
You can read the announcement for this from January 2025 here.
What does end of support mean?
After End of Standard Service, IBM no longer provides preventive service, new updates or fixes, or development of new machine code updates, patches, or fixes (including security fixes).
Extended Support is available for these models, see here.
I do not see any information for the EoS of the larger Power9s, E950 and E980.
New Years is one of my favorite times of year, as we are filled with the excitement for what 2026 will bring us all.
Before we put our feelings and thoughts of 2025 behind us, what did you find interesting last year? These were the top ten popular posts from last year:
Tomorrow, Saturday June 21 2025, is the 37th anniversary of when the IBM AS/400 was first announced. You can watch the video of the announcement in the UK here.
What a wonderful journey we have all been on all these years as the AS/400 (1988 – 2000) begat the iSeries (2000 – 2006), which in turn gave way to the System i (2006 – 2008), and finally IBM Power server running the IBM i operating system (2008 – Present). All the time being IBM's premier server and operating system providing modern functionality, stability and robustness to their customers.
Today the AS/400 looks dated, which it is. But IBM Power can hold its own compared to any comparable business system.
I think I did a good job describing this history for the 35th anniversary. If you are interested in learning more what AS/400 was, and what it has become, read the story here.
Happy birthday IBM Power and IBM i! May you have many more!
Every year my mind is boggled each time I reach the anniversary of this blog. It is incredible to me that I have been writing for a dozen years about everything I find interesting with IBM i, and that you take your time to read it. Your encouragement is very much appreciated.
What has happened in the past twelve months?
Last week, Monday 24 – Wednesday 26 February, was a truly historic event. The first COMMON event in India. I was lucky to be invited to make some presentations at the event.
I was most impressed by the attendees' thirst for knowledge for the latest about the IBM Power server and the IBM i operating system. While helping at the registration desk I was surprised how many people recognized me and the other USA based IBM Champions who were attending the conference. I soon lost count of the number of times I was asked to appear in someone's selfie. There was a range of experience there, from people who has been working with IBM i for decades, to students who want to learn about whether this was an environment they could have a career in.
IBM Champions: Gajendar Tyagi, Simon Hutchinson, Ranga Deshpande,
Marina Schwenk, Nirmal Kumar Khatri, Charlie Guarino
In my 37 years of working with IBM midrange, and especially IBM i and its predecessors, I learned something new that has blown my mind.
Spool as in "spool file" is an acronym!
I have always thought that "spool" was the queue of spool files on an output queue. A long list of spool files would be like piece of thread from a spool of thread. It turns out my assumption is wrong.
I have Alan Seiden to thank for bringing this to my attention.
It turns out the definition of a "spool" is:
Another year has passed, and now our thoughts turn to the New Year, 2025. New Years is one of my favorite times of the year, it is filled with excitement for what the forthcoming year will bring us all.
Before we put the old year out of mind, what did you find interesting last year? These were the top ten popular posts from last year:
Today marks the 36th anniversary of the launch of the AS/400 server and the OS/400 operating system on June 21, 1988.
Over this time the server has evolved, with the change from CISC to RISC chips and the improvements in chip technology, to become the IBM Power server. The operating system has been rewritten several times to include the latest evolving technologies to become IBM i, which is not the only operating system that can run on a IBM Power server.
What we have today is not AS/400 and OS/400, even though everything we could with them we can do today with the modern server and operating system.
I think I did a good job describing this history last year, for the 35th anniversary. If you are interested in learning more what AS/400 was, and what it has become, read the story here.
Happy birthday IBM Power and IBM i! May you have many more!
Another year has passed, and this blog is now eleven years old. It is still a labor of love, and I want to continue to bring you the news about IBM i and IBM Power, and the best examples of using IBM i. I am grateful to all of you for visiting this site, and especially to you who have reached out to me with their feedback and encouragement.
On the personal side I was grateful to be recognized by IBM as an IBM Champion for Power for the fourth year.
Another year has passed and we all look forward into the New Year, 2024, with excitement thinking of all the good things it can bring to us all.
Before I put the old year out of mind, what did it bring us in the IBM i world?
What did you find the most interesting last year? These were the top ten popular posts from last year:
It has been a few months since the IBM i's 35th anniversary, I wanted to share this old news story from KTTC TV, Rochester Minnesota, broadcast on the day of the launch of the AS/400, June 21, 1988.
Click on the image below to open the video of the news story.
I am grateful to the person who sent me the link to the IBM Support document "Service Extension for IBM i 7.3, 7.2, and 7.1", dated July 10, 2023.
I am not going to repeat what the document says, I will provide a link to it below.
The last dates that you can have support for these old releases is:
There has been lots of publicity in the build up to today, and I thought I would add my thoughts on the 35th anniversary of IBM i. That is a little misnomer as the server that was launched on June 21, 1988, was called AS/400, IBM Application System/400, which ran the OS/400, Operating System/400, operating system. Over the intervening years both the server and the operating system have been enhanced to be so much more than AS/400 / OS/400, becoming a thoroughly modern server, IBM Power, and operating system, IBM i.
As this is an anniversary I am not going to talk about the future of IBM Power and IBM i, which is "golden", I am going to write about the history of this.
Saturday was the tenth year anniversary of this web site. IMHO that is a remarkable milestone. I have seen other IBM i related web sites and YouTube channels come and go in that time, as people do not appreciate the effort it takes to research, write, and publish content on a regular basis. I am not sure how long I thought I would write, I guess it was until there was nothing more about IBM i to write about. Fortunately IBM has obliged and this decade has seen more additions and changes to our favorite operating system than any other. Long may it continue.
The old year is behind us, and I am always so hopefully and excited what the New Year will bring us all. Perhaps the new year will feel a bit more like the world returning to a kind of normal we have not seen for a couple of years.
In the IBM i world 2022 brought us:
What did you find interesting last year? These were the top five popular posts from 2022:
With IBM Power10 and Power9 being marketed it should not come as a surprise that IBM announced the end of their maintenance support for Power8 servers.
Power8 chips were announced in 2013, and became available in Power servers in June 2014.
If your employer is currently using a Power8 server, or older, you should show your superiors this announcement, linked below. This shows that the Power8 models may have different End of Service dates, but all of dates are in 2024. And start planning to move to a more recent Power server.
If you do not know what your server is you can check using the method described here.
Wow! It was nine years ago I wrote the first post of this blog. Here I am almost 800 posts later and I am still writing. Fortunately, IBM has "cooperated" and has released a lot of really interesting and exciting things in this time, giving me lots of material to write about.
This where I pick my favorite five posts of the past 12 months, which is always a struggle as there is always so many things to consider:
Opposite my office at work is a closet. I finally was given a key to it yesterday. I found that it is full of many, many old things: documentation for software my employer no longer uses, tapes of various types and size, CDs, floppy disks, what looks like many lengths of twinax cable, and one bag with an IBM logo on it.
I am a curious person so I took the bag from the closet into my office, wondering what this bag could contain.