MTN Sudan

Have you ever heard of the AS/400? It is IBM hardware from the late 1980s. Most IT people under 40 have never seen one. Yet there are companies that still run critical manufacturing on it. Order processing, BOMs, production scheduling. All of it on a system older than most of the people using it. Quick fun fact: when IBM launched the AS/400 in June 1988, the World Wide Web did not exist yet. Tim Berners-Lee proposed it the following year. The hardware running in one of our plants is older than the public internet. We are replacing one right now as a part of migrating the manufacturing part to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central as part of the group ERP harmonization. The interesting step is the one in the middle. Before the BC cutover, we moved the AS/400 itself off the on-premise hardware and into our IaaS provider. So today we have a 30-year-old platform running in a modern hosted environment, monitored monthly, while we prepare the migration. Why lift a legacy system to IaaS if you are going to turn it off anyway? Because the on-premise hardware risk was too high to carry through the migration. One disk failure on aged hardware and the project becomes a disaster recovery project. IaaS removed that risk and gave us breathing room to do the BC implementation properly. I have seen servers fail to start after routine maintenance — simply because the hardware was too old to come back up. I have seen mission-critical workstations running for years under the desks of IT technicians, until one day they died and took operations with them. None of this is unusual in manufacturing. And all of it can be solved — with proper planning, the right strategy, and a business case that someone is willing to fund. What is the oldest piece of hardware still doing critical work in your company? #ManufacturingIT #ERP #BusinessCentral #LegacySystems #AS400