Tootfinder

Yeesh, IBM installing Grok on prem for people; of all choices of AI to want on prem:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/23/ibm_q3_2025/

IBM is just not into the 'spend megabucks on cloudy GPUs' thing, rents them instead
: Infra revenue soars and AI helps everything … except the share price

IBM says it was able to run a key quantum computing algorithm in real-time on commonly available field programmable gate array chips made by AMD (Stephen Nellis/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/ibm-says-key-quantum…

And yes, all these sizes were referred to as "diskettes" (small disk), even the 8" one, even by their inventor, IBM.
Even in huge letters on the sleeve.

IBM reports Q3 revenue up 9% YoY to $16.3B, above $16.1B est., and Hybrid Cloud (Red Hat) revenue up 14%, below 16% est.; IBM drops 5% after hours (Brody Ford/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-22/ibm-posts-l…

Wenn ich die Preise bei ebay sehe, dann hätte ich die #IBM #RS6000 wohl damals nicht zum Elektroschrott geben sollen.

IBM-Chef hält aktuellen KI-Bauwahn für nicht tragbar
Das Wettrüsten zwischen Hyperscalern verschlingt Billionen US-Dollar. IBM-CEO Arvind Krishna hinterfragt, wie wirtschaftlich das ist.
https://www.

Once is luck, twice is coincidence, but three times in a couple of days is a trend.
An IP4 /17 from T-Mobile USA, a /16 from Fujitsu USA, and another /16 from IBM - all to Saudi Telecom.

It's alive!
The IBM 5150 (AKA IBM PC) just needed two caps on the 12V line replaced. The monitor had some plastic rattling around in the case. Both of those were pretty easy to solve.
#retrocomputing

IBM and Cisco plan to link quantum computers over long distances and aim to provide a proof-of-concept by 2030, potentially paving the way for quantum internet (Stephen Nellis/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-tel

💽 Motorola, Intel, IBM Make A Mainframe in a PC - The PC XT/370
#ibm

Motorola, Intel, IBM Make A Mainframe in a PC - The PC XT/370
Turning an IBM PC/XT into a Mainframe Compatible Desktop

Consume some more #retro #BIOS stuff for your Sunday!
https://int10h.org/blog/2025/11/lost-i

Oh, would you look at that? iBM has removed Ginni’s fawning open letter to Donald Trump after his election win.
https://www.ibm.com/blogs/policy/ginni_romettys_letter_to_the_president_elect
This from the company that, when asked about its compl…

Inspired design from IBM here

The director of IBM's Research Lab has some bold takes on the future of computation.
We're on the cusp of two simultaneous technological revolutions - #AI and #quantum - that will fundamentally change how the world uses computers to solve difficult problems.
There have only been two c…

IBM predicts a computation revolution
Quantum and AI are ushering in a whole new range of algorithmic possibilities, says IBM’s research lead.

Rating 26 years of #Java changes
https://neilmadden.blog/2025/09/12/rating-26-years-of-java-changes/

Was flipping through my old photos and found this absolutely pornographic shot of my IBM P70 portable

Venga, #batallitaAbueloCebolleta que va.
En mi primer curro en una fšbrica (se dice el pecado pero no el pecador) estuve trabajando de operador de consola de un AS/400 y un RS2000 de Siemmens.
Pocas semanas antes de fin del año 99 el jefe decidió hacer pruebas para ver si el sistema aguantaría el temido Efecto 2K. IBM le propuso alquilarle un servidor de pruebas, …

"IBM owns Red Hat which in turn runs Fedora, the popular desktop Linux distribution. Sadly, shit rolls downhill, so we’re starting to see some worrying signs that Fedora is going to be used a means to push “AI”."
(Original title: Using “AI” to manage your Fedora system seems like a really bad idea)

Back when I worked at SDC in Santa Monica (roughly 1971 through 1980) one of our department's projects was an early AI project.
We had an entire IBM 370 mainframe running CP/67 (which became IBM's VM) running LISP based AI code.
I think that the group may have been using it for continuous speech recognition - which we knew our "national security' customer was planning to use to automate wiretaps.
(I used the speech recognition project's soundproof room …

"For Levy and Newborn, the stakes were clear, and the title of the first chapter of the book says it all: “The Challenge is World Champion Kasparov”. Said chapter describes in detail the match between a first iteration of a chess supercomputer by IBM, the less well-known “Deep Thought”. It was a strong contender, having defeated quite a few grandmasters along the way (including the aforementioned Levy), but was no match for Kasparov in August 1989."

David Levy & Monty Newborn
The literature about and around chess is too long to enumerate in an article of a thousand words, and this is clearly not my intent. If you want to learn chess, there are so many good books around, it is hard to pick just one. There are, however, fewer books explaining the art of how to teach a computer to play chess; and the one chosen for this issue of the Library section does a magnificent job at precisely that.

An interview with IBM CEO Arvind Krishna on why there's no AI bubble, his view that Watson's healthcare push was "inappropriate", IBM's quantum bet, and more (Nilay Patel/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/podcast/829868/ib

Why IBM CEO Arvind Krishna is still hiring humans in the AI era
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna on Watson, the AI bubble, and why he’s hiring college grads.

Zahlen, bitte! Die Lochkarte: 80 Zeichen wegweisend in die EDV
Herman Holleriths Lochkarten-Maschine führte nicht nur in das EDV-Zeitalter, sondern war auch der Grundstein für IBM und den abgeleiteten 80-Zeichen-Standard.

Cryogenic In-Memory Computing with Phase-Change Memory
Davide G. F. Lombardo (IBM Research Europe, Ruschlikon, Switzerland), Siddharth Gautam (IBM Research Europe, Ruschlikon, Switzerland), Alberto Ferraris (IBM Research Europe, Ruschlikon, Switzerland), Manuel Le Gallo (IBM Research Europe, Ruschlikon, Switzerland), Abu Sebastian (IBM Research Europe, Ruschlikon, Switzerland), Ghazi Sarwat Syed (IBM Research Europe, Ruschlikon, Switzerland)

Cryogenic In-Memory Computing with Phase-Change Memory
In-memory computing (IMC) is an emerging non-von Neumann paradigm that leverages the intrinsic physics of memory devices to perform computations directly within the memory array. Among the various candidates, phase-change memory (PCM) has emerged as a leading non-volatile technology, showing significant promise for IMC, particularly in deep learning acceleration. PCM-based IMC is also poised to play a pivotal role in cryogenic applications, including quantum computing and deep space electronics…

Good examples in that article for why a prompt-based system for system administration seems odd: You type a hundred-word question and are told by the AI to use apt when the Fedora system doesn’t use that package manager at all. https://mstdn.social/@osnews/115702679695335298

Look at that nerdy beauty! 🤓
Pantasy Old School Computer Kit | 1980s IBM PC330 Replica Blocks
https://pantasy.com/products/retro-90s-pc-85005
It has so many nice details included:

Anthropic and IBM partner to make Anthropic's Claude models available in IBM's latest IDE, and IBM aims to make Claude available in more products soon (Belle Lin/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/anthro…

☕ Rating 26 years of Java changes
#programming

Rating 26 years of Java changes
I first started programming Java at IBM back in 1999 as a Pre-University Employee. If I remember correctly, we had Java 1.1.8 installed at that time, but were moving to Java 1.2 (“Java 2”), which w…

I hate trying to work with OS/2. I'm told this worked on IBM systems, but it's a pain in the ass on anything else. Right now, it can see the drive, crate partitions, but not volumes. And it needs volumes to install.
I'm at the point where I be happy if it nuked my two windows installs (because I can put those back) if it would just install itself....
#retrocomputing

Epic insights on the #semiconductor industry in #Taiwan. We’re on the second day of our workshop, with a heavy focus on walks.
/
The industry came to the island in the freaking 1950s. Here’s a precious IBM machine, infamously transported by horse car 🐎 because trucks were to shaky…

Corporate podcasts are increasingly incorporating video elements, with major companies like IBM and Google producing video interviews featuring executives (Emma Jacobs/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/5c6cb2e2-f374-4084-ab2b-42b00d07ca1c

»Red Hat erleidet möglicherweise massiven Breach:
Das Unternehmen untersucht einen Vorfall in seiner Gitlab-Instanz. Cyberkriminelle behaupten, 28'000 Repositories mit Kundendaten gehackt zu haben.«
Nimmt mich wunder wie "unsicher" Rad Hat von IBM nun ist. Ich wünsche keinen deren Kunden, dass dies Auswirkungen hat. Bin aber gespannt ob es indirekt auch @…

IBM agrees to acquire data streaming software maker Confluent for ~$11B in cash, above its ~$8B market value as of its December 5 close, paying $31 per share (Lauren Thomas/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/business/deals/ibm-nears…

If it's there and you can see it - it's real. If it's not there and
you can see it - it's virtual. If it's there and you can't see
it - it's transparent. If it's not there and you can't see it - you
erased it!
-- Scott Hammer an old IBM VM statement

Well, I had the dip switches set incorrectly and it was trying to test memory that didn't exist. Fixed that and the floppy drives seem to work as well...
I'm also impressed that the Dell System 200 DOS 3.3 Master disk (circa 1987) is still working.
#retrocomputing
#IBM5150

IBM computer hardware was weird, proprietary, and very expensive, but it was also really, really fucking good. Their z/Systems still are. Top-notch operational documentation, too.

A pretty period perfect fun song by
The British IBM
for you #retrocomputing #bbs nerds:
B B S
https://

Sources: IBM is in advanced talks to buy data streaming software maker Confluent for ~$11B, above its market value of ~$8B as of December 5 close (Lauren Thomas/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/business/deals/ibm-nears-roughly-11-billion-de…

Quantum Computing as a Service - a Software Engineering Perspective
Aakash Ahmad, Muhammad Waseem, Bakheet Aljedaani, Mahdi Fahmideh, Peng Liang, Feras Awaysheh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04982

Quantum Computing as a Service - a Software Engineering Perspective
Quantum systems have started to emerge as a disruptive technology and enabling platforms - exploiting the principles of quantum mechanics via programmable quantum bits (QuBits) - to achieve quantum supremacy in computing. Academic research, industrial projects (e.g., Amazon Braket, IBM Qiskit), and consortiums like 'Quantum Flagship' are striving to develop practically capable and commercially viable quantum computing (QC) systems and technologies. Quantum Computing as a Service (QCaaS) is view…

It's a year since the last chemo round. And 6 months off venetoclax 🤢 I'm cancer-free(-ish) and back to work at HashiCorp (now IBM, which sounds very weird to me)

IBM plans to cut "a low single-digit percentage" of its workforce in Q4, affecting thousands of staffers; it employed ~270K workers as of the end of 2024 (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-04/ibm-…

"One workload I now support would cost an estimated £6000 per month to run on one of the large cloud providers, which would allow me to purchase the actual hardware in use four times over every year. But “spinning up an instance” today using free credits means you can worry about that cost later, whereas ordering a box from Dell means waiting two to three business days by which time the hackathon is over."

Five Computers
There is no direct evidence that Thomas Watson, Sr. predicted in 1943 that there would be "a world market for five computers". First, he probably didn't know about computers back then: in the 1940s computers were classified research projects at the UK Government Code and Cipher School and the US Army, while Watson's IBM were famously involved with the other side during the war.

A Hybrid Quantum-AI Framework for Protein Structure Prediction on NISQ Devices
Yuqi Zhang, Yuxin Yang, Feixiong Chen, Cheng-Chang Lu, Nima Saeidi, Samuel L. Volchenboum, Junhan Zhao, Siwei Chen, Weiwen Jiang, Qiang Guan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06413

A Hybrid Quantum-AI Framework for Protein Structure Prediction on NISQ Devices
Variational quantum algorithms provide a direct, physics-based approach to protein structure prediction, but their accuracy is limited by the coarse resolution of the energy landscapes generated on current noisy devices. We propose a hybrid framework that combines quantum computation with deep learning, formulating structure prediction as a problem of energy fusion. Candidate conformations are obtained through the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) executed on IBM's 127-qubit superconducting…

How researchers at Microsoft, IBM, and other organizations are using AI to speed up the search for new materials and chemicals for batteries (Andrew Moseman/IEEE Spectrum)
https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-battery-material

AI Drives Battery Innovation at Microsoft, IBM
What if AI could find the perfect battery material in hours, not years? Discover the latest advancements.

I'm sure that VMS is completely documented, I just haven't found the
right manual yet. I've been working my way through the manuals in the document
library and I'm half way through the second cabinet, (3 shelves to go), so I
should find what I'm looking for by mid May. I hope I can remember what it
was by the time I find it.
I had this idea for a new horror film, "VMS Manuals from Hell" or maybe
"The Paper Chase : IBM vs. DEC". It's based on Hitchcock's "The Birds", except
that it's centered around a programmer who is attacked by a swarm of binder
pages with an index number and the single line "This page intentionally left
blank."
-- Alex Crain

The 86th edition of De Programmatica Ipsum is out!
This month, we explain to younger generations what the name "Borland" meant to older cohorts of software engineers; in our Vidéothèque section, we watch a video about OOP by Borland’s founder Philippe Kahn; and in the Library section, we review "Masterminds of Programming" by Federico Biancuzzi and Shane Warden, focusing in particular on the interview of Anders Hejlsberg.

IBM releases Granite 4.0, an open source "enterprise-ready" LLM family with a hybrid architecture, claiming it uses significantly less RAM than traditional LLMs (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat)
https://venturebeat.com/ai/western-qwe…

If you can't see what Canonical are doing with their snap obsession, or IBM-RedHat with Wayland and GNOME, then let me spell it out: they're trying to remake Linux in their own proprietary image to steer the ship away from common standards and kill the competition, or at least force it to be downstream of their control. We've been here before:

"After the 8-bit MOS Technology 6502 that powered the Apple II around 1980, Macs used the 16-bit (later 32-bit) Motorola 68000 around 1990, then 32-bit (later 64-bit) IBM PowerPC around 2000, later settling with Intel’s 32-bit x86 and 64-bit x86-64 around 2010.
We are in 2020, not even around 2020 anymore, and we should be able to spend an insane amount of money to buy Macs powered by ARM architecture CPUs – “finally!”, as some of those headlines online would scream."

Eternally Finally
It is hardly possible these days to browse any blog or news website commenting the latest trends in the Apple galaxy, without reading references to the mythical, yet entirely foreseeable, ARM-based Mac. The existence of this not-yet-announced piece of otherwise overpriced hardware is entirely predicted by a closer reading of technology history in that same galaxy, an exercise usually (sadly) abhored by many.

IBM launches Digital Asset Haven, a digital assets platform built with crypto wallet provider Dfns for financial institutions, governments, and companies (Anna Irrera/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-2…

#MyCPUTimeline
Oldest to newest from 1987 to about 2010:
MOS6502 (Apple IIe)
Intel 80286
Intel 80486SX
AMD 80486DX4
Cyrex 6x86 P200
Intel Pentium II (x2)
AMD Athlon MP (x2)
AMD Operon (x2)
IBM Power G4
Intel Core 2 Duo
Newer stuff isn't so interesting.

1Password CEO David Faugno says the company has crossed $400M in ARR, up from $250M in 2023, as it benefits from a shift in the threat landscape due to AI (Samantha Subin/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/ryan-reynolds-backed-1password-tops-400…

Password manager backed by Ryan Reynolds, other celebs, hits key revenue metric on AI tail winds
1Password was founded in 2005 and counts IBM, Perplexity AI, Salesforce and the Golden State Warriors among its customers.

IBM releases four open-source Granite 4.0 Nano AI models ranging from 350M to 1.5B parameters, designed to run on consumer hardware and even in web browsers (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat)
https://venturebeat.com/ai/ibms-open-source-granite-4…

HSBC says it has tested an IBM quantum computing tool on European bond market data and saw a 34% improvement over traditional methods in predicting order fills (Arjun Neil Alim/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/d9d40c18-0fb6-4b7f-aa92-00aed1900859