This video highlights a recent event at the USC Film School, bringing together the Hollywood film community with top IBM scientists where they talk about how the world might be in the year 2050. IBM’s Tim Washer, with the mic, steals the show with his witty comments. Enjoy.

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.

Armonk NY – Early photos of the prototype version of the famed Batmobile have revealed the real manufacturer as none other than IBM. Who else could pull off making a car with heavy armor plating, a high performance engine, rocket boosters and a weapons system controlled by an IBM Bladecenter running the IBM i operating system?

The Batmobile is depicted in the 2005 film Batman Begins and the 2008 film Batman: The Dark Knight. The film’s production designer described the machine as being a cross between a Lamborghini, a Hummer and an IBM System i.

Another classic IBM iSeries advertisement. Where were these ads during the Superbowl?

Rochester MN - With the recent announcement of the new IBM Power Systems which will replace the System i hardware, the i5/OS will also be replaced and renamed. Because of the much greater capabilities of the new operating system, IBM has named it the Virtual Universe Operating System – VU/OS.

Running under VU/OS, the individual user appears to have not merely a machine of their own, but an entire universe of their own, in which they can create or remove their own programs, databases, libraries, users, networks, and planetary systems. They need only specify the universe they desire, and the VU/OS system generation program (QGOD) does the rest. This program will reside in the QSYS library. The minimum time for this function is 6 days of activity and 1 day of review. In conjunction with VU/OS, all system programs have been replaced by one program (QPROPHET) which will also reside in the QSYS library. This program has no parameters as it knows what you want to do when it is executed.

Naturally, the user must have attained a certain degree of sophistication in the IT field if an efficient utilization of VU/OS is to be achieved. Frequent calls to non-resident galaxies, for instance, can lead to unexpected delays in the execution of a job. Although IBM, through its wholly owned subsidiary, The United States, is working on a program to upgrade the speed of light and thus reduce the overhead of extraterrestrial and metadimensional paging, users must be careful for the present to stay within the laws of physics. IBM must charge an additional fee for violations above the *NOMAX limit.

VU/OS will run on any IBM Power System equipped with the Extended WARP Feature which is a single-board nuclear reactor that supplies the needed 20 KW of three-phased power for up to 12 years.

Users should be aware that IBM plans to migrate all existing systems and hardware to VU/OS as soon as their engineers effect one output that is (conceptually) error-free. This will give them a base to develop an even more powerful operating system, target date 2010, designated “Virtual Reality”. VR/OS is planned to enable the user to migrate to a Totally Unreal Universe. Although Apple Computer claims its users have existed in a Totally Unreal Universe for years, IBM refutes those claims.

The IBM Virtual Universe Operating System, coupled with the new Power Systems hardware, is designed to help you consolidate and simplify your IT environment and your universe at the same time.

For more information, contact your IBM Virtual Representative.

New York, NY - In the relatively modest confines of the Helen Mills Theater in New York City, Mike Daniels, Senior Vice President of IBM Global Technology Services, outlined IBM’s plan to save energy. As part of IBM’s Project Big Green, the services arm of IBM announced today that its 190,000 service technicians worldwide will be using the latest in green, zero-emissions, vehicles. The new service vehicle is called the “Smart Cart” and is produced by Smart GmbH, a subsidiary of Daimler AG of Germany, the same makers of the Smart Car.

This eco-friendly approach will reduce IBM’s overall carbon output by as much as 7,500 tons of carbon emissions per year and save IBM $145,600,000 in fuel costs. In addition to the benefits to the environment, it is estimated the average service technician will lose about 16 pounds, saving IBM an additional $56,000,000 in health care costs.

So that’s what IBM is up to. What’s your company doing today to help protect our environment?

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: