Rochester MN - The new IBM Power™ 995 server is the most powerful server ever offered by the IBM Galactic Empire. This server provides out-of-this-world performance with massive scalability. The Power 995 is by far the most remarkable technological product of the IBM Galactic Empire. It is a brutal and awesome culmination of engineering and science of a galaxy-spanning organization. With unrivaled power, it can perform an infinite loop in under 4-seconds and requires two HALT instructions to stop it.

It was designed to help enterprises, governments and empires deploy the most cost effective and flexible IT infrastructure while achieving the industry’s best application performance. As the most powerful member of the IBM Power™ Systems family, this server provides exceptional performance and massive scalability. It’s full range of complex, mission-critical applications include:

• Large-scale transaction processing
• Massive-scale server consolidation
• Ultra-high bandwidth communications
• Super-advanced data mining and warehousing
• Small planetary systems destruction

At 900 km (550 miles) in diameter, the IBM Power 995 must be deployed in a low-earth orbit and requires a 12-year lead time before orders of this product become operational.

Equipped with ultra-high frequency IBM POWER9™ processors in up to 1000-core, multiprocessing (SMP) configurations, the Power 995 server can scale rapidly and seamlessly to address the changing needs of today’s empires. It can seamlessly consolidate millions of UNIX®, IBM i (formerly known as i5/OS®) and Linux® application workloads onto a single system.

Powered by an array of 12 nuclear reactors generating up to 25 gigawatts of power, the IBM Power 995 can run continuously for 97 years.

With extraordinary power, proven IBM technology and expansive growth potential, the Power 995 server is ready to take your empire to the next level. Contact your local IBM representative today to place your order!

Luxor, Egypt - An Egyptian-Dutch team unearthed a hall in a tomb at Zira Abu al-Naga, on the Westbank at Luxor. The tomb was thought to be another burial site because of its proximity to the tomb of Tutankhamun. However, upon entering the tomb, the discovery of a lifetime was made – an ancient data center, most likely used for the administration of King Tut’s royal society. Most astonishing was how well the data center was preserved with the main AS/400 server still intact. Most Egyptologist have agreed that the Egyptian culture was very advanced, but no one dreamed they had this kind of technology. It is now much easier to understand how the Ancient Egyptians dug their tombs and built their temples.

In an exclusive interview with Mid-Deranged, SCA chief Zahi Hawass, the world’s most renowned Egyptologist, offered the following perspective: “Why is this discovery important? Because it answers so many questions of how the Egyptians were able to do what they have done. Everyone thought the Egyptians had some kind of magical power and now we find this data center in the Valley of the Kings. It was found seven meters away from King Tut! This area has been excavated before and yet we missed this site. What a discovery. So many things about the Egyptian civilization now make sense.”

Otto Schaden, leader of the team that uncovered the find, generally agrees with Hawass’ assessment. Standing in front of the site, Schaden told Mid-Deranged, “For all we know, there may be a S/370 buried here. Who knows? You can speculate endlessly.”

The find will be studied for some time before before all the answers are known. One of the most fortunate discoveries that will help in the research is the fact that the ancient AS/400 fired right up when power was applied to it. Data retrieval is currently underway. Hopefully preliminary results will be available soon.

Believe it or not, we have discovered an amazing and easy technique that will convert your ordinary PC laptop to an Apple MacBook. After much research and trial and error, we have perfected and simplified the technique so that anyone can make the conversion. We actually have one running in the lab at this moment. See the following photo as proof!

Rochester, MN - In order to better compete with the growing competition from PC Windows Servers, IBM plans to install a reset button on the newly announced Power Systems and change all IBM i operating system error message text to read “General Protection Fault – Press RESET.”

This new feature will give IBM customers the ability to compete head-to-head with Microsoft Windows servers. There is additional talk of adding another feature that will randomly cause the system to restart or lockup for no apparent reason. Because of the stable nature of the IBM i operating system it will be difficult to quickly implement this feature and therefore will have to come at a later date. However, with features like these it will give customers no reason to move to Wintel servers.

(Note: The AS/400 Geek originally wrote this piece as an April Fools joke in April of 1997 for a local AS/400 user group newsletter. Notice how close this humorous article has become reality. The text is exactly as published in 1997.)

When IBM recently announced that it was moving its Austin, Texas-based RS/6000 assembly operations to its 3.7 million square foot facility in Rochester, Minnesota, the same production line the AS/400 is built on, rumors flew about what this move meant. IBM publicly denied any convergence of the two machines and that the move was simply to consolidate manufacturing. But sources inside Rochester have confirmed there are AS/6000 machines running inside the IBM lab with the intent to produce them in the near future.

Because of recent advances in technology with the AS/400 and RS/6000, they both have PowerPC RISC processors and share the same DASD and tape subsystems. It finally became evident that the only difference between the two machines was the operating system.

The new AS/6000 will sport a new operating system named OS/6000 which can emulate either AIX or OS/400. When running in AIX mode the system requires 6 or 7 operators, a network manager, a security engineer, a database manager and four C programmers. When running in OS/400 mode the system requires a dark cool room to run in but may need a janitor or errand boy to change the backup tapes once in a while.

IBM cuts back on it’s advertising budget:

Dear AS/400 Geek,

The percent of used disk space on my iSeries keeps creeping higher and higher. Is there a simple way I can clean up my disk drives to reduce this percent?

A: Yes, the system has a very simple command that will significantly reduce the amount of disk storage used. An example of the command is:

CLRLIB LIB(*ALL)

This command may take a while to process but gives you a real bang for the buck. It will free up a great deal of storage space on your system’s hard drives. Have a nice day!

Kenya, Africa - M’wana Ndeti, a member of Zaire’s Bantu tribe, used an IBM System i hard disk drive yesterday to crush a nut.

Ndeti, who spent 20 minutes trying to open the nut by hand, easily cracked it open by smashing it repeatedly with the powerful disk drive.

“I could not crush the nut by myself,” said the 47-year-old Ndeti, who added the savory nut to a thick, peanut-based soup minutes later. “With IBM’s help, I was able to break it.” Ndeti discovered the nut-breaking disk drive yesterday, when IBM was shooting a commercial in his southwestern Zaire village. During a break in shooting, which shows African villagers eagerly teleconferencing via computer with Japanese school children, Ndeti snuck onto the set and took the hard drive, which he believed would serve well as a “smashing” utensil. Read the rest of this entry »

So true, so true!

Rochester MN - With the recent news of IBM’s intent to acquire the Nintendo Corporation it was further annouced today another joint development effort between IBM and Nintendo. IBM is announcing the Network Boy, a small handheld device that communicates with your IBMii, System i  or AS/400 network via RF and allows the user to navigate the network using four simple buttons. It has a small display screen that sports a mini-GUI and runs the Mario/OS operating system. The advantages are simplicity, low cost, and zero training for the younger generation of users.