Gearfuse

Take one IBM PCjr, hook it up to the Internet, say a prayer and boom: you have yourself TwittJr. It displays three tweets on its 16-color display. The power of 4.77Mhz!

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The other week, IBM was going to buy Sun and the world seemed to be in equilibrium. But that deal fell through and Sun was left standing in the middle of the street with its pants down. Lucky for J. Schwartz & Co., Larry Ellison’s Oracle Corporation decided to use flex its power and purchase Sun Microsystems for about $7.4 billion.

What does this mean? Aside from the consolidation effect this economy is having on a lot of companies, Oracle will now be positioned as one of the biggest tech companies to ever exist, especially by adding MySQL to its coffers after Sun acquired the company last year. Additionally, Oracle can now enter the hardware business (or get out of it) and bundle its software with servers and the like. A fine day as two tech giants collide.

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Title says it all.

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Here’s a photo of a ledger from the 1984 collection from IBM. Those striking pastels and regal fonts really bring it all together. Look how proud IBM was:

“For the introduction of the IBM PC, we designed the packages and software manual, creating, instead of the industry’s usual cheap plastic binders, hard-bound linen covers and slipcovers in pastel colors to stress cultural elegance and personal values.”

Personal values? Holy shit, IBM. You just blew my fucking mind.

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Ergonomic split keyboards have always been hideous looking. Who wants two halves of a keyboard, anyway? Stenographers, that’s who. So, Datamancer turned a rare IBM M-15 Ergo Keyboard into a steampunk keyboard for steampunk stenographers who’ve been looking for a matching keyboard to go with their headsets and goggles.

The quality of the keyboard is superb. Packing violet LED lights, a soft burgundy wrist pad and a detailed acanthus-leaf pattern on the brass, it almost appears to be merely an adjustment to appearance. However, Datamancer has done so much more. Adding an integrated touchpad mouse, which is located at the center of the keyboard, relieves its users of having to search for that hard-to-find steampunk mouse.

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A lot has changed since IBM was releasing room sized computers with PC sized 1 GB hard drives. So much so, that IBM has unveiled their Power 575 Supercomputer, which runs off of one of the world’s fastest microprocessors, the Power6, and relies on an innovative cooling system to keep from exploding. More impressively, it all seems smaller than that original 1GB hard drive from way back when.

The design and hardware of the Power 575 requires 80% fewer air conditioning units, using its water cooling system to save energy consumption by 40%. IBM claims that the water system can be 4000-times more effective then traditional air cooling. The 575 monster has 448 processor cores per rack, making it 5 times faster the performance of its older brother. Each rack offers a whopping 14 2U nodes, each featuring 32 4.7-Ghz cores of Power6, and 3.5 TB of memory! — Andrew Dobrow

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