Happy birthday to IBM Power and IBM i

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!

A dozen years of RPGPGM.COM

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?

Inaugural Common India a great success

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

I was today's years old when I learned...

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:

Happy 2025 to you all

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:

Happy birthday to IBM i

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!

Eleven years and still going

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.

Happy New Year 2024

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?

• After seven years the end of regular support of IBM i 7.3
• Ten years after its announcement the end of service for IBM Power8 servers
• Two new Technology Refreshes for 7.4 and 7.5

What did you find the most interesting last year? These were the top ten popular posts from last year:

AS/400 launch TV news story

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.

 

Service extension for old releases of IBM i

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:

35th anniversary of IBM i

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.

It has been a decade!

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.

Happy New Year 2023!

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:

• A new version of IBM i, 7.5
• Two new Technology Refreshes for 7.3 and 7.4, and the first TR for 7.5
• Merlin
• Midsized Power10 servers

What did you find interesting last year? These were the top five popular posts from 2022:

End of maintenance for Power8 servers

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.

Announcement 922-117
Services withdrawal: Declaration of plan to discontinue lease, rental, and maintenance services for select POWER machines

If you do not know what your server is you can check using the method described here.

9 years and counting!

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:

It's a luggable, huggable AS/400!

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.

Happy New Year, 2022!

Last year was blighted by the COVID pandemic again. I am sure all of us are glad to see another year dominated by the virus behind us. I am keeping my fingers crossed that we might start returning to a more "normal" life this year.

Despite all the restrictions upon our working lives IBM still managed to bring us a new Power server series, Power 10, starting with the E1080 server. As well as two Technology Refreshes. You can read about it all on this website.

Every year I look to see what were the most read posts of the year. These were:

Happy 8th birthday!

Wow! Another year has passed and RPGPGM.COM celebrates its eighth birthday today. I know I act surprised every year, I do so for two reasons:

1. I cannot believe that another year has passed!
2. There is more interesting IBM i stuff I have not written about yet

Despite lockdowns and COVID I have an exciting year:

It's been IBM i for longer than AS/400

In a post on LinkedIn yesterday Steve Will, chief architect of the IBM i, shared an interesting milestone in the life of the this operating system.

This operating system had been known as IBM i for a long as it was known as AS/400.

Happy 7th birthday RPGPGM.COM

Another year has passed and this blog has reached its seventh anniversary. We are living in interesting times with IBM i, and over the years I have been fortunate to write about many things, that in my opinion, have made significant improvements to programming with this operating system. As well as a whole lot of cool additions to Db2 for i (SQL). I have learn a lot from what I have written about, and I am sure that I write better code than I use to.

The past year has been an exciting time, not only for this blog but for me too. I would include the following as my personal high points, in no particular order: