They are not only still supporting it, it is a current product under a new name (IBM i). We just bought at S924 last year running IBM i.

OS/400 and AS/400 are some of most underrated and unknown machines.

AS/400 (I only used it back in those days, I don't know enough about newer series). Would run for years with no attention given to them. I saw people stuff it in a closet and forgotten about it.

Some did have the smarts to rotate backup tapes then they knew where it was.

If the machine needed help it would "call" IBM and report it, and there would be a technician there to help it before the customer knew there was a problem.

As with many things, I wish IBM would make it GPL, but the changes of that happening is very low. Also the programming languages is not familiar to many

The current machines we have (S924) calls IBM by itself. It had a bad RAID card so an IBM technician showed up and replaced it. It is a bit strange as a System Admin being the second one called.

We do a daily tape backup. LTO-7 is big enough to hold all the financial data. There is also a couple of companies that will do automatic offsite backup for a very reasonable price. They will even stage the data to a hosted environment until you can get a replacement machine (and I suppose a replacement building).

I do wish IBM had a simulator or small machine that programmers could use. The cost of entry to write software for the things is way too high.

I would like a BSD / MIT license as I am a BSD fan. Honestly, I wish I had time to work on a non-UNIX non-Windows Clone Operating System. Ideas like the AS/400 / IBM i architecture are amazing.

Sorry, I meant 1988. My bad. Wikipedia has old info about versions and end of life.