Historia de los servidores de IBM

"New to IBM systems", en la sección de Servidores de IBM Developer, muestra una breve línea de vida de sus servidores de datos, con una descripción elemental del alcance actual de cada uno de los tipos de servidores. Quizá la línea más movida, y probablemente la generadora de más innovación, haya sido la iniciada por el System/3, que ha llevado al I5 (antes, AS/400):

IBM System i models also follow a rich history, beginning with the powerful and innovative IBM AS/400® products. System i is a scalable minicomputer based on a virtual machine (VM) design. Applications compile to a virtual instruction set (called TIMI) rather than the system’s native instruction set. Through this behavior, an application that was compiled for an original AS/400 system (using the IBM PowerPC® AS A50 processor) can run on a new eServer iSeries™ system (running an IBM POWER5™ processor) without having to be recompiled.

Wikipedia es otro punto de entrada para conocer el ISeries:

[en 1995] IBM re-christened the one-stop shop programming style "OPM" (for Original Programming Model) and introduced a new language paradigm called "ILE" (for Integrated Language Environment). ILE had significant enhancements over OPM, including the ability to create modules (similar to .obj or .lib files), and then bind (link) the modules together into a single executable. The executable could be created as a program or a service program (service programs are similar to .lib or .dll files).
The real power of the ILE environment is in the "integrated" aspect, however. Modules in ILE-compliant languages (RPG, COBOL, C, C++, and CL) could be created and bound together. For the first time, AS/400 programmers could exploit the strengths of multiple ILE-compliant languages in a single program. Also, with the introduction of service programs, standard routines could be externalized more easily, and modularity increased. To ensure proper migration to the ILE environment, OPM RPG and COBOL programs could be migrated to ILE easily

Nota: Este artículo, por largo tiempo, perdió el enlace a las páginas asociadas de IBM. El artículo original se puede localizar a través de The Internet Machine, en su versión del 5 de enero de 2007. La referencia siguiente al Sistem i5 también ha cambiado su ubicación.