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Dr. Frank Reminisces on 35th Anniversary, Looks to Platform’s Future

June 28, 2023 Alex Woodie

The IBM i community came out in force last week for the 35th anniversary of the creation of the AS/400 back in 1988. IBM corralled a handful of IBM i authorities to speak during three webcasts it held for fans around the world. During a call with European community members, Frank Soltis, who developed the architecture for the S/38 and AS/400, kicked things off by declaring there was really just one platform.

“I think one of the distinct distinctions that I have is that I worked for IBM for 45 years before retiring,” Soltis, the retired IBM chief scientist told …
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Infor Touts Stronger Roadmap For IBM i ERP

May 4, 2022 Alex Woodie

It may not be fashionable in some circles to have ERP software that runs on IBM i, since containerized microservices running in the cloud are all the rage. But since it was fully acquired by Koch Industries last year, Infor does not care. That change of heart is at the center of a renewed focus on continued development of its IBM i ERP systems.

For many years, Infor actively pushed many of its IBM i customers to move to other platforms, including cloud-based ERP systems. While it didn’t sunset any of the IBM i products (it has around a dozen …
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Open Source The Path To Software Riches For IBM i

December 2, 2020 Alex Woodie

For what is supposed to be a proprietary platform, the IBM i server sure has a lot of open source software running on it. In recent months, it appears that the majority of new programs introduced to IBM i are open source in nature. That pattern shows no signs of changing any time soon, according to a recent report by OpenLogic.

Open software has existed on the IBM i platform for many years. The first highly publicized dip into the open source well occurred in 2005, when IBM partnered with a company called Zend to bring its PHP runtime to …
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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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Mono Port To IBM i Now Available

October 31, 2018 Alex Woodie

IBM i shops that want to run Microsoft .NET can now do so through the Mono middleware, which was officially ported to IBM i and AIX earlier this year by the Mono community. While the port is not feature complete, Mono can now run on IBM i 7.1 and higher via the PASE AIX runtime. It’s not a native port, but it’s better than nothing.

Mono is an open source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET Framework, including a C# compiler and the Common Language Runtime (CLR), that allow .NET applications to run on non-Windows platforms, including Linux, MacOS, BSD, various flavors …
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Modernize Your Apps, Leapfrog The Competition

April 23, 2018 Alex Woodie

The IBM i server has a well-deserved reputation for reliability and low cost. It also has a reputation for not being the most agile and cutting-edge platform on the market (which is also well-deserved). However, thanks to innovative modernization techniques, IBM i shops can get the benefits of innovation and perhaps leapfrog competitors who wasted resources buying middling tech along the way.

City Furniture faced this predicament recently. The South Florida chain of furniture stores wanted to extend into the showroom the same type of experience that customers first encountered while perusing the company’s website. The company figured that putting …
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Dr. Frank Reminisces on 35th Anniversary, Looks to Platform’s Future

Infor Touts Stronger Roadmap For IBM i ERP

Open Source The Path To Software Riches For IBM i

Retranslation Could Boost Performance

Mono Port To IBM i Now Available

Modernize Your Apps, Leapfrog The Competition

Content archive

Recent Posts

Subscribe

Pages

Search