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:

• New way in RPG to monitor for errors
• New RPG op-code to send messages to job log
• Extra parameters added to Call command to prevent decimal data error
• New version 7.5 announced
• Encrypting data with SQL

Were there any others you thought were really useful? If so please let me know in the comments below.

What will happen in 2023?

For those of you still using IBM i 7.3 you need to start making plans to move to a higher release before September 30.

Looking at the charts and tables from IBM there will not be a new release this year.

We all know there will be TRs for IBM i 7.4 and 7.5, one in the Spring and the other in the Fall. Perhaps there might be one more "secret" TR for 7.3, in the Spring only, before it reaches end of support.

There are a number of anniversaries this year:

• 64 years:  First iteration of the RPG programming language
• 35 years:  AS/400 server and OS/400 operating system
• 28 years:  RPGLE (ILE RPG) programming language
• 22 years:  Free form calculations only in RPG
• 10 years:  Free form definitions in RPG
• 8 years:  Totally free form RPG.

This year will be is this blog's tenth anniversary too!

On New Year's day I always like to do two toasts. The first to all that happened in the year behind us, and the second the year in front of us. I hope you will join me in both toasts, with your favorite beverage. All I know is whatever happens in 2023 I will write about it here!