AS/400 Family
Its average installation, in Italy, sees from 2/3 user stations up to a few hundred connected.
Its operating system is OS/400 (recently renamed “i5/OS”). It is a proprietary operating system manufactured and developed by IBM.
It’s a very effective operating system with at least 30 years of experience. In fact, the OS/400 directly evolved from the operating system of the “System 38” an IBM computer originally marketed in 1979.
Particularly robust and reliable, the AS/400 is deeply rooted in the Italian SME sector and in particular in family companies, where it is highly appreciated for the low cost of management and the large availability of software packages suitable for the needs of Italian companies and, in particular, manufacturing.
Introduced on the market in 1988 they evolved, in part, towards a “server” structure in the early 90’s opening their proprietary architecture and starting to support a long series of market standards.
With the introduction of Power5 processors around the year 2000, they changed their name to iseries and later “System i”.
More recently, IBM, as part of a further restructuring of the names of its computer lines, again changed the name of these computers to “IBM i”.
The name AS/400, however, still stands as the most classic name with which these computers are identified and is what the loyal community of developers, which operates on this system, still prefers to use today.
The line of processors of the AS/400 system has evolved over the last 15 years to the latest, extremely powerful, Power9.
The AS/400 systems, in fact, do not use Intel processors, such as CPUs, but Power processors, produced by IBM itself.
This line of hardware based on this type of processor supports not only the operating system i5/OS of the AS/400, but also the operating system AIX (Unix in the version developed by IBM) and the “Linux on i” that is Linux for Power processors.
The AS/400 is normally available in both Rack and Tower formats.
