ISTTOK has performed one of the earliest experiments of AC tokamak operation showing that long discharges could be produced merely with inductive current drive. However, due to the design of the machine, the data acquisition system and the power supplies, a limit of 250 ms (six times the nominal forward shot duration) is currently imposed.In this paper the relevant constrains to attain current operation up to the limit of the stable toroidal magnetic field (3s) are discussed and the work being carried out to achieve this goal is presented.The conditions that shall be accomplished are: (i) removing the power deposited on the limiters; (ii) density control through gas puffing and monitoring the recycling from the walls; (iii) assessment of the free magnetic flux available on the iron core (Wmax=0.2 Vs); (iv) reformulation of the data acquisition system towards an event driven philosophy maintaining the actual distributed architecture but allowing a real‐time control; (v) active control of the equilibrium ma...