THE AS/400 REACHED A crossroads in 1998. It celebrated its 10th birthday in June, 10 years of being the most successful multi-user business computing system, while looking ahead to playing an ever-increasing role in the enterprise computing market thanks to February's groundbreaking V4R2 release of OS/400.

V4R2 and everything that came with it was the biggest story of 1998. Hailed as the most significant OS/400 upgrade since CISC to RISC, the February release brought Java, native Lotus Domino and Windows NT on the IPCS to the AS/400.

The AS/400's implementation of the Java Virtual Machine soon became recognized as the best in the computer industry since the JVM runs within the operating system, rather than on top of it as on other platforms. As Java goes, so will the AS/400 in the years ahead.

IBM announced in March that it had successfully consolidated 40 PC servers into three AS/400 S40s for its Rochester, Minn. facility Domino implementation. IBM also announced the Tarpon DASD super array for multi-system storage, while Advanced Business Link Corp. (Kirkland,Wash.) came up with a native AS/400 Java client applet that includes 128-bit SSL security. Codenamed "Javalin," the product is now marketed as Strategi.