What Happened to the IBM AS/400? Why It Never Really Went Away

1995 found more than 300,000 IBM AS/400 systems installed worldwide, when the industry called minicomputers finished. The name is gone now, yet the machine behind so many order desks and warehouses still runs today as IBM i. IBM announced the AS/400 on June 21, 1988, to replace the System/36 and System/38. By 1991 it had sold more than 100,000, and IBM put the line near $15 billion a year. In June 1995 IBM moved it to a 64-bit PowerPC processor without customers recompiling their programs. What changed was the brand: iSeries in 2000, then Power Systems and IBM i in 2008. What this video covers: 1. How the Silverlake project in Rochester merged two lines 2. Why one integrated box won over furniture chains and car dealers 3. How J D Edwards and warehouse software vendors built on it 4. How the layered design survived the jump to RISC 5. Why IBM retired the AS/400 name 6. Why skills, not hardware, now decide its future If you ever typed your user ID into that green Sign On screen at the start of a shift, tell us what your company ran on it. Subscribe for more histories of the machines behind the back office. The hardware never failed. The name did. Sources: IBM Application System/400 Technology (SA21-9540-0) - IBM, 1988: https://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/as400/SA... AS/400 System Handbook V3R7 - IBM, 1996: https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_ibma... J D Edwards and Company Form 10-K for fiscal 1997 - SEC EDGAR, 1998: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/79... It's Official: Now We're Power Systems and i for Business - IT Jungle, 2008: https://www.itjungle.com/2008/04/07/tfh040... #AS400 #IBMAS400 #IBMi #iSeries #IBMRochester #Minicomputer #GreenScreen #RPG #WarehouseManagement #ComputingHistory Disclaimer: The voiceover used in this video was generated using AI.