Retro-futuristic advertisement image for the fictional IBM Personal Transport electric vehicleThe IBM Personal Transport (PT) comes with LuxeDrive technology, freeing you to take your hands off the wheel and THINK. Its advanced Watson AI learns your routes and preferences, delivering a safe, efficient journey every…
Cover image for the IBM ASCII vs EBCDIC history postComputers work with text by encoding characters in an alphabet as numbers.There are several natural questions when considering character encoding:What alphabet would we like to encode?Do we care about things like lowercase vs uppercase?Which number should represent…
On April 7, 1964, Tom Watson Jr. stood at the front of a conference room in IBM’s Poughkeepsie, NY research lab. Looking beyond the podium and out into the audience, Watson saw two hundred influential writers and editors belonging to the 1960s tech cognoscenti. Looking a little closer, he saw a series of television…
A few months ago, IBM slapped me on the wrist. No, this wasn’t really physical punishment or like <a title="Protect your Nuts: Hazing and Mainframes at West Point" href="/mainframes-at-west-point/" target="_blank">hazing like at the Military Academy</a>. Rather, it was a Notes Inbox slap named <em>Action Required:…
Today is December 1, 2013. Today I turn twenty-eight years old. Today is also approximately the ten year anniversary of the most interesting “birthday party” I’ve ever been to. As a millennial mainframer, I’ve occasionally had instances where I’ve figuratively considered my nuts in a vice (like last week, when I ran…
A composite image of an Apple Mac laptop alongside an IBM mainframe, representing the Mac 3270 setupMac 3270? Water and Vinegar? How Mainframers began to use MacsIt may seem strange to think that users, application developers, and systems programmers of IBM mainframes may use a Mac 3270 solution for serious work.…
Despite derision as a dinosaur doomed to gradual extinction, a recent breakthrough in mainframe technology has the potential to transform the world of modern data centers. On July 22, 2010, IBM released the zEnterprise, a product that combines mainframe and distributed computing environments into what Rod Atkins,…