midrange.com was created to be a free online resource for IBM i (formerly System i, iSeries, & AS400) professionals.

midrange.com started life as The Midrange System BBS ... which was created as a cheaper alternative to News/34-38's NewsLink service. The first hardware the BBS ran on was a Compaq Portable II with a 12mhz 80286 CPU and a 20mb hard disk.

In 1993, the internet was starting to become popular, and on a lark, the midrange.com domain was registered and a UUCP account was setup with a local ISP.

Using software that allowed the BBS forums to be gated to email based mailing lists, the first list hosted by midrange.com was created ... MIDRANGE-L.

About a year later, the BBS system suffered a catastrophic hardware failure. Obviously this caused a bit of a disruption. After careful review, it was determined that the BBS concept would be abandoned, but the mailing list was still quite viable. After a bit of research, a new Linux system was installed and mailing list software setup.

midrange.com currently runs Amazon AWS Lightsail instances. This website is running on an IBM i hosted by Franken i.

midrange.com was created, is maintained, owned, and operated, by David Gibbs. David is a Principal Software Engineer for PTC

All mailing list's hosted by midrange.com are available in a searchable web archive. The archives are broken down by list, year, and month.

The software used to create the archives makes a 'best effort' attempt to mask email addresses.

The archives can be found at archive.midrange.com.

The best way to contact is us via email. Send email to @support.midrange.com.

Our postal mail address is:

In the event you cannot contact us via the email address shown above, you can also contact us at @allonewordnospaces.net.

midrange.com provides a number of email based online disucssion forums.

Most of the lists are topic specific ... the RPG400-L list is for RPG discussion; the MAPICS-L list is for discussion of the MAPICS ERP system, etc. General IBM i topics are best suited to the MIDRANGE-L list.

• MIDRANGE-L : Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
• BPCS-L : Infor (formerly SSA) BPCS ERP System
• C400-L : Bare Metal Programming IBM i (including MI programming)
• COBOL400-L : COBOL Programming on the IBM i
• Consult400 : Consulting on the IBM i (posting of contract positions is allowed on this list)
• Domino400 : Lotus Domino on the IBM i
• JAVA400-L : Java Programming on and around the IBM i
• LINUX5250 : Linux 5250 Development Project
• MAPICS-L : MAPICS ERP System Discussion
• MIDRANGE-JOBS : Midrange Jobs: Postings & Discussion (contract & consulting positions not allowed)
• Midrange-NonTech : Non-Technical Discussion about the IBM i
• PcTech : PC Technical Discussion for IBM i Users
• RPG400-L : RPG programming on the IBM i
• SYSTEM21 : System 21 Users
• WDSCI-L : Rational Developer for IBM i / Websphere Development Studio Client for System i & iSeries
• WEB400 : Web Enabling the IBM i
• OpenSource : Open source software and IBM i

• Larry Bolhuis - Franken i: For hosting this website