There has been a lot of fanfare about this year being the 30th anniversary of the launch of the AS400, the esteemed ancestor of the IBM i operating system. Many others have written tomes about what this anniversary means to them, and I thought I would add a few thoughts of my own.

On June 21 1988 the server and operating system that had be known by insiders as Silverlake was launched to the world as the AS400. It was the brain child of Dr Frank Soltis to create a system for midsized businesses.

There was not just one launch event, there were many each one in a different country. The video below is of the launch event held in the UK.

The platform and operating system evolved through a series of operating system releases and hardware enhancements the AS400 evolved. In 2000 it became the iSeries, and in 2006 the System i. With each operating system and hardware upgrade it became something more. It could do everything the first AS400s could do and more, so much more.



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In my opinion the Power System server, released in 2008, became a real game changer. Rather than have one set of servers for AS400 and another for AIX, IBM's flavor of UNIX, a new server was built, the Power System, that could run both, and Linux too.

The beauty of the IBM i is that it still does everything that first AS400 did, and over these 30 years the operating system has been rewritten and enhanced to be that IBM i is no longer just AS400, it so a lot more.

Steve Will, chief architect did a wonderful video presentation about the evolution of this operating system. Alas, it is not on YouTube so I cannot embed it here. This presentation can be found here.

What of the future? IBM is committed to this operating system. At conferences I have seen charts showing a future that goes beyond the next ten years.



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And IBM has posted videos reiterating its commitment to IBM i.

Will the future IBM i continue to look like the AS400? Many have said that the AS400 is dead, and they are right the AS400 died in 2000. With the enhancements that have been made to IBM i, to its database (Db2 for i) and programming languages (for example totally free RPG), as well as the integration of PHP (Zend PHP) and other open source languages IBM has shown that this operating system has a strong and exciting future.

So raise a glass of your favorite beverage and make a toast to the AS400 for being the first, IBM i for being the current, and for whatever exciting new things IBM will bring to us in this operating system in the future.

Other interesting web pages I found: