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EWLwiki I ask Vt320 and Guy_Harris for your permission, guidance, and consensus, in adding additional content of the rich history of the AS/400 platform, with the hope that you do not revert sincere, honest edits.
The AS/400 article lacks clarity in the chronological, extensive incremental advances to hardware and operating system occurring in the years 1988 to 2006.
The brand names eServer iSeries, System i5, System i, and each processor, can add important clarity to the family that became so different over time, until the platform was discontinued in 2008 with the introduction of IBM Power Systems. Many people lack understanding and appreciation for the significant changes that occurred.
For example, it would be very helpful be more chronological in the article. Example: describe more in dept the Dynamic Logical Partitioning that was introduced with eServer iSeries on POWER4. LPAR was a huge technological advance.
Example: the Integrated File System (IFS) [1] did not exist on the platform in the early years. We should describe in detail at what version release (and processor level) the IFS was implemented into the architecture, and how significant the IFS became to the later generations of AS/400. IFS is just one of the many things that show that AS/400 began as an midrange computer. It was not a server, not connected to the internet, and very proprietary, not easy to connect to other systems.
IBM has always made it so that application code is forward-compatible to a newer machine and OS version, so that customers do not need to recompiled source code IBM RPG II or IBM RPG III or IBM COBOL or IBM ControlLanguage when migrating to a newer machine onnewer IBM POWER microprocessors or OS/400, not IBM i version level.
But as customers incorporate into their application code the hundreds of features of the computer language and hardware, that new code is NOT backward-compatible, that is, cannot run on an older processor or OS level because the those language features and OS features did not exist on the older machines.
What say you? EWLwiki ( talk) 18:50, 12 December 2021 (UTC)
References
Consider my edit: Convergence title makes more sense than Consolidation, evidenced by words in this section, somewhat modeled on article Technological convergence. EWLwiki ( talk) 22:38, 19 March 2022 (UTC)
I am impressed with the style shown in articles Linux kernel, History of Linux and Linux kernel version history I think the articles on IBM AS/400 and IBM i and IBM Power Systems could benefit by incorporating some of the style shown in the Linux articles. What say you? EWLwiki — Preceding undated comment added 22:26, 19 March 2022 (UTC) EWLwiki ( talk) 22:39, 19 March 2022 (UTC)
There should be a discussion of the role of the CREATE PROGRAM instruction, which compiles a TIMI template into a program object. I don't know about AS/400, but on S/38 that was the only way to create execurable code. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul ( talk) 16:51, 24 January 2024 (UTC)
A citation was requested for "Although announced in 1988, the AS/400 remains IBM's most recent major architectural shift that was developed wholly internally." with the comment "...while POWER 7, 8, 9 and 10 were still developed in-house".
New Power processors aren't architectural shifts - they run newer versions of the Power ISA, but they don't support a completely new ISA.
But I'm not sure what the AS/400 is a shift from. Much of it is the same system architecture as System/38. The instruction set shift did switch from the developed-wholly-internally IMPI to the developed-internally (if you don't count Motorola and Apple's contributions to PowerPC) PowerAS (or whatever term refers to the AS/400-only extensions to PowerPC/Power ISA), but that wasn't part of the switch from System/38 to AS/400, that happened later in AS/400 history.
So the question remains - what does "architectural shift" mean here?
And, in any case, a citation is called for. Guy Harris ( talk) 19:19, 21 May 2024 (UTC)