What’s this gent holding? A toaster? Farm equipment? Part of an engine? Wreckage from a destroyed tank? Nope — that’s 4KB of old-fashioned IBM memory. That’s enough to hold 12 per cent of my Facebook profile picture!
Rather than trying to shrink current data storage technologies further, IBM took the opposite approach and designed a new system from the ground up — building it individual atoms. The new storage could lead to 100-fold increases in chip densities. Take that, Moore’s Law.
What do you do if you’re IBM in the 1950s and need to market your behemoth computing machine to a conservative public? Commission a 10-minute informative short to designers Charles and Ray Eames, of course! “The Information Machine” was the result of a unique collaboration that aimed at naturalizing the computer within the context of civilization’s intellectual history and American consumerism–-no easy feat.
In 2007, Steve Jobs stood on a stage and denounced the “smart” phone — ugly, mismatched keyboards of Nokia and RIM. Rightfully! But he also championed Apple as the mobile keyboard killer. However, IBM beat them almost two decades earlier.
In the 1950′s IBM was synonymous with computers but faced a serious problem. Computers at that time were enormous, vacuum tube-driven machines — completely alien technology to the average person — and that bred a fear of them. To counter this PR nightmare, IBM turned to none other than Charles and Ray Eames.
Mind Reading. Power harvesting. No more passwords. The Death of spam. Technology for everyone. These are five thing IBM believes are the future. Not 50 years in the future, but more like five years in the future.
IBM’s Watson is most famous for handing Ken Jennings his arse on Jeopardy, but since then the supercomputer’s talents have been used to help doctors diagnose and treat disease. But Watson’s greatest trick might still be ahead of it: beating back the scourge of patent trolls.
3D transistors? Ugh. Dude, that’s so 2011. IBM’s new design for RAM, employing a 3D manufacturing process, is where the real future magic lies.
As a kid, there was nothing good about classroom clocks. They either reminded you that you weren’t escaping anytime soon, that time was running out to finish that chapter test, or it would slow down in the last 10 minutes of the day. But guess what? This IBM clock had a clever little secret.
Warren Buffett popped up on American TV this morning to talk about this and that and how his investment firm Berkshire Hathaway casually dropped $US10.7 billion to become IBM’s largest shareholder, and… waaaaaaaaaaaaaait… WHOA.
