The IBM i 30th Anniversary Is Here and We Need Your Photos
Do you have some photos you’d be willing to share?
OK, that sounds a little weird. Let me give you some context.
People with a little knowledge of the platform (and a basic understanding of arithmetic) have already started asking me whether IBM is going to be recognizing the 30th anniversary of the platform. Most of you will remember that, back in 2013, we had a lot of fun as a community with the #IBMi25 celebration. We celebrated that the platform we know and love today as IBM i on Power Systems was “born” as the AS/400 back in June of 1988.
So, now five years later, are we going to recognize the anniversary again?
You’d like me to answer that, right?
Well, how about you take some hints?
We’re looking to the community to share some photos with us. We’d like photos related to IBM i today and from its history. We’d be happy of photos of the technology, but we’d be even happier with photos of the people who use the platform. For example, photos of user groups, meet-ups, conferences, demos, parties—anything related to IBM i and our great community through the years.
We’re asking anyone who wants to contribute something to send it to Elizabeth Huson or Brandon Pederson, preferably by March 2. The higher the resolution of the photo, the better, and files of type png and jpg are preferred.
Again, we’d like photos by March 2 if you can. It’s not that we can’t use photos which arrive after March 2, but those which arrive by the deadline have a chance to be included in some special material. It might be anniversary-related. Possibly.
If we were going to celebrate a 30th anniversary, you see, we would want to include the community—because the IBM i community is something special! So, even though we’re not quite ready to actually kick off the celebration, we’d like to solicit some community representation.
I have a couple of examples, in case you are not quite sure what I mean. But if you’ve been to COMMON’s Annual Conference, or the COMMON European Congress, or the RPG/DB2 Summit, or iSUC, or any of the conferences held by QUSER, OCEAN, OMNI, LISUG, Data3—the list goes on and on—then you have similar photos. (And, no, none of these have a photo of the actual systems—I’ve had my picture taken with a lot of systems—I wonder who has those photos.)
So, there: The hints have been dropped and the request is out there. If you’re the organizer of an event, you probably have photos to send. Please, send them! If you took a photo of yourself next to a new system in 1988, or 1999, or yesterday—send it! If you and your coworkers want to hold up a big IBM i logo in front of your business, take a photo and send it along.
I think this is going to be a fun year.