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Monday, June 10, 2013

Family tree of the IBM i

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the launch of the AS400.

How much has changed since I first encountered a B50, and started learning RPG III.

How many of you worked with the B models?

Family tree of the IBM i
Click to see larger image.

Angus the IT Chap posted three images showing the evoluton of the IBM i on his blog, which you can see here»

The story of how the AS400 got its name is given in a book authored by John Sears. It was originally going to be called the Application System/40, or AS/40. IBM's PC development team complained about the name. They had just developed the PS/2, and if the midrange group was to take the double digit numbers they would be restricted to just ten models, PS/0 - PS/9. Therefore, IBM's management decided that the PCs could have the range of numbers 0-99, midranges 100-999, and mainframes would have the range 1000-9999. Thus the AS/40 became the AS400.

I remember the PS/2 and the PS/1, which came after the PS/2. Were there any other PSs?

2 comments:


  1. Interesting that u had travelled the journey since beginning .. Wow

    ReplyDelete
  2. I worked on S/38 configurations for our hospital customers and at the same time my coworkers were involved in the
    Silverlake IBM Project. I worked with the marketing team that announced the AS/400 in Orlando FL. June 1988. I designed quite a few systems for our hospital customer base around America.
    I left the business partner in 1991 but continued my work designing systems for agribusiness and banks. It was a great journey with direction from people like Dr Frank Soltis and John Sears. Great help from my.friends in Rochester MN. No longer in data processing but it was a a great 50 year journey and 25 years on IBM Midrange systems. Thanks to the folks at IBM USA. Now Mexico and India.

    ReplyDelete

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