Mainframe Quotes

Sir, I think you need to read this,’ he said, nervously handing over the mainframe’s dissertation of its own wellbeing.

What in the name of Llar was that all about?’ Colin asked, his face still drained of colour. ‘I have no bloody idea,’ William said his voice quivering.

I see you made it Jack,’ he started to say, noticing a silver sphere roll across the loading bay floor. It stopped just short of his shoes before it exploded.

She stood panting as adrenalin fired up her muscles. Flipping open the safety catches on both of her laser pistols, she set them for maximum delivery. Anything or anyone on the receiving end of these weapons would never survive, even as atoms.

He hacked the FBI mainframe as a teenager and once sent an email from a former president's account, just because he could.

Today, your cell phone has more computer power than all of NASA back in 1969, when it placed two astronauts on the moon. Video games, which consume enormous amounts of computer power to simulate 3-D situations, use more computer power than mainframe computers of the previous decade. The Sony PlayStation of today, which costs $300, has the power of a military supercomputer of 1997, which cost millions of dollars.

According to my sources," Megan says, which I'm pretty sure is code for I hacked into the police mainframe, but please don't tell my mom...

IBM and other mainframe companies spent more money selling their products and serving their customers than they did in actually building their machines.

IBM and other mainframe companies spent more money selling their products and serving their customers than they did in actually building their machines. They sold their computers to people who were actually going to use them, not to middlemen, and this market required good manners. Microcomputer companies sold equipment as if it were corn, in large quantities; they spent most of their money making things and competed not by being polite but by being aggressive.

You might think my chosen career would lend me insight…. But while I can tell you about the brain as a physical object…, beyond that I am a glorified techie. I know the nuts and bolts and can diagnose flaws within the mainframe. While I can identify and sometimes fix structural maladies within that organ, I do not remotely understand it. That is an impossible task, like trying to guess the path rainwater will take down a windowpane. There is simply no way to know with any accuracy what is happening inside someone else’s head. I only faintly comprehend what is going on inside my own.

Though we nearly lost everything last month, when the mainframe got possessed by Sumerian demons, and we had to call in a technodruid to exorcise it. I’d never heard language like that before, and even after it was all over, the office still smelled of burning mistletoe for weeks. And I might add that the computer Helpline people were no bloody use at all.

Then he shoved his hand into the console, wrapped his fingers around the hard drive, and pulled. The program retaliated, digging into his mainframe, clawing him apart. There was no pain. But the moment before he crushed the starship's hard drive, not long enough by any quantifiable standards, he knew he would miss Ana. He would miss her more than iron and stars.

On Harlan’s World, you don’t see many mandroids. They’re expensive to build, compared to a synthetic or even a clone, and most jobs that require a human form are better done by those organic alternatives. The truth is that a robot human is a pointless collision of two disparate functions: artificial intelligence, which really works better strung out on a mainframe, and hard-wearing, hazard-proof bodywork, which most cyberengineering firms designed to spec for the task at hand. The last robot I’d seen on the World was a gardening crab.

Over the years, Rao would master two computer languages, COBOL and BASIC, and would also go on to write code in the mainframe operating system UNIX. Narasimha

Barack’s head was an overpacked suitcase of information, a mainframe from which he could seemingly pull disparate bits of data at will.

In an interview in 1992, Leary stated, “It is a genetic imperative to explore the brain. Because it’s there. If you’re carrying around in your head 100 billion mainframe computers, you just have to get in there and learn how to operate them.

I think I have a pretty deep understanding of what Money actually is on a practical day to day basis because of paypal. right now, the money system for practical purposes is really a bunch of heterogeneous mainframes running old COBOL. Literally.

The truth is that a robot human is a pointless collision of two disparate functions: artificial intelligence, which really works better strung out on a mainframe, and hard-wearing, hazard-proof bodywork, which most cyberengineering firms designed to spec for the task at hand.

For his birthday, she'd bought him an iPhone, which he'd returned to the store. He'd apologized, saying that it was a thoughtful gift, but he didn't want to carry a tiny high-powered mainframe on which he could compute astronomical algorithms, or check Facebook. He wanted a phone.

So since we’ve clearly created a monster, which of us is Dr. Frankenstein, and who gets to be Igor?” I asked, hoping to inject a little levity. “I’m definitely the doctor. He had the nicer ass.” “I hate to be a bubble burster, but you’re a disembodied AI; you don’t have an ass.” “I have since I met you.” “Aw. And you do have quite a mainframe on you.” I realized after saying it how weird that was, since technically her mainframe was my mainframe, and I really didn’t want to dwell on how incestuous that was. “But what if I’m not ready to be a father?” “Well, you’re already a bother, so all you’d really need to do is give an F.” “That was low, and given how terrible my standards are, you should recognize what kind of an insult that really is.” “Don’t be a jerk. It’s unbecoming.” “Well, apparently I’m becoming a jerk. Were you expecting a pumpkin?

The truth is that a robot human is a pointless collision of two disparate functions: artificial intelligence, which really works better strung out on a mainframe, and hard-wearing, hazard-proof bodywork, which most cyberengineering firms designed to spec for the task at hand. The last robot I’d seen on the World was a gardening crab.

Fans of mainframe computers boasted of the benefits of handling many jobs in large batches. But the mainframe was as efficient as mass transit—wonderful as long as everyone wanted to travel to the same place at the same time. The PC was like an automobile; it would go anywhere its driver wanted. Instead of organizing work around the mainframe’s schedule, a person with a PC could do computing anytime. The

The 1970s were the decade of megabytes. In the summer of 1970, IBM introduced two new computer models with more memory than ever before: the Model 155, with 768,000 bytes of memory, and the larger Model 165, with a full megabyte, in a large cabinet. One of these room-filling mainframes could be purchased for $4,674,160. By 1982 Prime Computer was marketing a megabyte of memory on a single circuit board, for $36,000.

In the morning I walked to the bank. I went to the automated teller machine to check my balance. I inserted my card, entered my secret code, tapped out my request. The figure on the screen roughly corresponded to my independent estimate, feebly arrived at after long searches through documents, tormented arithmetic. Waves of relief and gratitude flowed over me. The system had blessed my life. I felt its support and approval. The system hardware, the mainframe sitting in a locked room in some distant city. What a pleasing interaction. I sensed that something of deep personal value, but not money, not that at all, had been authenticated and confirmed. A deranged person was escorted from the bank by two armed guards. The system was invisible, which made it all the more impressive, all the more disquieting to deal with. But we were in accord, at least for now.

Think different” isn’t just a slogan. It’s a credo, one that made Apple the most profitable company in human history. People accused Steve Jobs of creating a “reality distortion field,” but he understood that reality is already distorted. Apple would never win by trying to build a better mainframe computer. That would have been playing by IBM’s rules. Instead, Apple created a personal computer because that was what it wanted the future to look like.

Finding a situation that catches the key competitor or competitors with conflicting goals is at the heart of many company success stories. The slow Swiss reaction to the Timex watch provides an example. Timex sold its watches through drugstores, rather than through the traditional jewelry store outlets for watches, and emphasized very low cost, the need for no repair, and the fact that a watch was not a status item but a functional part of the wardrobe. The strong sales of the Timex watch eventually threatened the financial and growth goals of the Swiss, but it also raised an important dilemma for them were they to retaliate against it directly. The Swiss had a big stake in the jewelry store as a channel and a large investment in the Swiss image of the watch as a piece of fine precision jewelry. Aggressive retaliation against Timex would have helped legitimize the Timex concept, threatened the needed cooperation of jewelers in selling Swiss watches, and blurred the Swiss product image. Thus the Swiss retaliation to Timex never really came. There are many other examples of this principle at work. Volkswagen’s and American Motor’s early strategies of producing a stripped-down basic transportation vehicle with few style changes created a similar dilemma for the Big Three auto producers. They had a strategy built on trade-up and frequent model changes. Bic’s recent introduction of the disposable razor has put Gillette in a difficult position: if it reacts it may cut into the sales of another product in its broad line of razors, a dilemma Bic does not face.4 Finally, IBM has been reluctant to jump into minicomputers because the move will jeopardize its sales of larger mainframe computers.

In the early thirties IBM built a high-speed calculating machine to do calculations for the astronomers at New York’s Columbia University. A few years later it built a machine that was already designed as a computer—again, to do astronomical calculations, this time at Harvard. And by the end of World War II, IBM had built a real computer—the first one, by the way, that had the features of the true computer: a “memory” and the capacity to be “programmed.” And yet there are good reasons why the history books pay scant attention to IBM as a computer innovator. For as soon as it had finished its advanced 1945 computer—the first computer to be shown to a lay public in its showroom in midtown New York, where it drew immense crowds—IBM abandoned its own design and switched to the design of its rival, the ENIAC developed at the University of Pennsylvania. The ENIAC was far better suited to business applications such as payroll, only its designers did not see this. IBM structured the ENIAC so that it could be manufactured and serviced and could do mundane “numbers crunching.” When IBM’s version of the ENIAC came out in 1953, it at once set the standard for commercial, multipurpose, mainframe computers. This is the strategy of “creative imitation.

By that time, Bezos and his executives had devoured and raptly discussed another book that would significantly affect the company’s strategy: The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. Christensen wrote that great companies fail not because they want to avoid disruptive change but because they are reluctant to embrace promising new markets that might undermine their traditional businesses and that do not appear to satisfy their short-term growth requirements. Sears, for example, failed to move from department stores to discount retailing; IBM couldn’t shift from mainframe to minicomputers. The companies that solved the innovator’s dilemma, Christensen wrote, succeeded when they “set up autonomous organizations charged with building new and independent businesses around the disruptive technology.”9 Drawing lessons directly from the book, Bezos unshackled Kessel from Amazon’s traditional media organization. “Your job is to kill your own business,” he told him. “I want you to proceed as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of a job.” Bezos underscored the urgency of the effort. He believed that if Amazon didn’t lead the world into the age of digital reading, then Apple or Google would. When Kessel asked Bezos what his deadline was on developing the company’s first piece of hardware, an electronic reading

The collapse, for example, of IBM’s legendary 80-year-old hardware business in the 1990s sounds like a classic P-type story. New technology (personal computers) displaces old (mainframes) and wipes out incumbent (IBM). But it wasn’t. IBM, unlike all its mainframe competitors, mastered the new technology. Within three years of launching its first PC, in 1981, IBM achieved $5 billion in sales and the #1 position, with everyone else either far behind or out of the business entirely (Apple, Tandy, Commodore, DEC, Honeywell, Sperry, etc.). For decades, IBM dominated computers like Pan Am dominated international travel. Its $13 billion in sales in 1981 was more than its next seven competitors combined (the computer industry was referred to as “IBM and the Seven Dwarfs”). IBM jumped on the new PC like Trippe jumped on the new jet engines. IBM owned the computer world, so it outsourced two of the PC components, software and microprocessors, to two tiny companies: Microsoft and Intel. Microsoft had all of 32 employees. Intel desperately needed a cash infusion to survive. IBM soon discovered, however, that individual buyers care more about exchanging files with friends than the brand of their box. And to exchange files easily, what matters is the software and the microprocessor inside that box, not the logo of the company that assembled the box. IBM missed an S-type shift—a change in what customers care about. PC clones using Intel chips and Microsoft software drained IBM’s market share. In 1993, IBM lost $8.1 billion, its largest-ever loss. That year it let go over 100,000 employees, the largest layoff in corporate history. Ten years later, IBM sold what was left of its PC business to Lenovo. Today, the combined market value of Microsoft and Intel, the two tiny vendors IBM hired, is close to $1.5 trillion, more than ten times the value of IBM. IBM correctly anticipated a P-type loonshot and won the battle. But it missed a critical S-type loonshot, a software standard, and lost the war.

As for HAL singing “Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two),” this, too, was Clarke’s contribution, including the song’s gradual devolution to near incomprehensibility at the end. The idea originated in a visit he’d made in 1962 to Bell Laboratories, where he’d heard John Kelly’s voice-synthesizer experiments with an IBM 7094 mainframe, which had coaxed the machine to sing Harry Dacre’s 1892 marriage proposal—the first song ever sung by a computer.

Most of the mainframe computer companies never successfully made the transition to minicomputers, and most mini-computer companies missed out on PCs.

In this respect, the ENS is analogous to a microcomputer with its own independent software, whereas the brain is like a larger mainframe with extended memory and processing circuits that receive information from and issue commands to the enteric computer. (117-118)

My main duty was as a maintainer. There were many like me. Our world wasn't like the human world where everyone was 'different' and 'unique.' We had our roles, duties and functions and the Guardians of the Mainframe would not tolerate departure from those.

In fact, our research shows that none of the following often-cited factors predicted performance: age and technology used for the application (for example, mainframe “systems of record” vs. greenfield “systems of engagement”) whether operations teams or development teams performed deployments whether a change approval board (CAB) is implemented

how did IBM get into this mess in the first place? It is the central question to ask because its senior executives understood the economic dynamics underpinning IBM’s mainframe and PC businesses. Despite this, the majority demonstrated a reluctance to reduce the power and cultural influence of their portions of the firm as technological changes suggested new directions, new opportunities not seized on as quickly as they might have been,

she’s a simulation running on a bacterial alien mainframe.

The article spoke of antigravity disk research, and plans to make Pine Gap a major "control center" for a "New World Order". Pine Gap is equipped with whole levels of computer terminals tied-in to the major computer mainframes of the world which contain the intimate details of most of the inhabitants of industrialized nations.

I was marketing a database called DB2. DB2 was best known as the leading database platform on a mainframe (that’s what we used to call giant, powerful computers back in the olden days).

However, a small flaw developed in this market that had dire consequences years later. No one added the coupon accrued interest to their Repo transactions. Coupon accrued interest is the interest that accrues on a bond between semi-annual coupon payment dates. Basically, a bond accrues a little bit of interest each day. The value of a bond increases each day by that small amount of one day’s worth of coupon interest. In the 1950s Repo market, in order to keep things simple, Repo transactions were priced with just the principal amount of the trade. The bond’s Repo price was calculated by simply multiplying the bond’s par amount by the market price. No one added on the accrued interest. Picture this: It’s the 1950s and you don’t have a mainframe computer, calculator, or even a phone that makes basic calculations. Yes, there were hand calculations and tables that the back-office used to calculate yields and bond prices, but can you imagine how long that takes? At the time, it made back-office work just a lot easier by leaving the coupon accrued interest off of the trade. This had dire consequences down the road.

Building 20 was nicknamed “the Magical Incubator,” and the particular brand of magic incubating there in the late 1950s was hacker culture. In the lexicon of TMRC, a “good hack” was some feat of technical virtuosity undertaken for pure pleasure rather than necessity, like programming a mainframe the size of a dozen refrigerators to play a song.

done on IBM mainframes in the 1960s, but Gerald J. Popek and Robert P. Goldberg codified the framework that describes the requirements for a computer system to support virtualization. Their 1974 article “Formal Requirements for Virtualizable Third Generation Architectures” describes the roles and properties of virtual machines and virtual machine monitors that we still use today.

Under Musk’s direction, X.com tried out some radical banking concepts. Customers received a $20 cash card just for signing up to use the service and a $10 card for every person they referred. Musk did away with niggling fees and overdraft penalties. In a very modern twist, X.com also built a person-to-person payment system in which you could send someone money just by plugging their e-mail address into the site. The whole idea was to shift away from slow-moving banks with their mainframes taking days to process payments and to create a kind of agile bank account where you could move money around with a couple of clicks on a mouse or an e-mail. This was revolutionary stuff, and more than 200,000 people bought into it and signed up for X.com within the first couple of months of operation.

Formed a decade earlier by a Whirlwind engineer, Digital was a rising star among minicomputer suppliers, who broke sharply with tradition. In the past, computer designers had promoted large mainframes that shared their power between many jobs. Minicomputers, often priced well below a hundred thousand dollars, made it practical for the first time to dedicate a computer to a single job, such as keeping track of parts, the data for an experiment or the operation of a machine tool. Though

WHAT IS IT, exactly, that people are really afraid of when they say they don’t like change? There is the discomfort of being confused or the extra work or stress the change may require. For many people, changing course is also a sign of weakness, tantamount to admitting that you don’t know what you are doing. This strikes me as particularly bizarre—personally, I think the person who can’t change his or her mind is dangerous. Steve Jobs was known for changing his mind instantly in the light of new facts, and I don’t know anyone who thought he was weak. Managers often see change as a threat to their existing business model—and, of course, it is. In the course of my life, the computer industry has moved from mainframes to minicomputers to workstations to desktop computers and now to iPads. Each machine had a sales, marketing, and engineering organization built around it, and thus the shift from one to the next required radical changes to the organization. In Silicon Valley, I have seen the sales forces of many computer manufacturers fight to maintain the status quo, even as their resistance to change caused their market share to be gobbled up by rivals—a short-term view that sank many companies. One good example is Silicon Graphics, whose sales force was so accustomed to selling large, expensive machines that they fiercely resisted the transition to more economical models. Silicon Graphics still exists, but I rarely hear about them anymore.

It will work,” Sanha affirmed. “The A.I. was created to be good. Just like a human, it cannot fundamentally change that part of itself. If we get it connected to the world surveillance mainframe in time, it will be able to protect us from any and every existential threat.” “There’s

En cambio, el mayor riesgo es que se vean eclipsados por otra empresa que domine un nuevo mercado adyacente, eventualmente más grande, donde el ganador también pueda llevárselo todo. El nuevo mercado puede entonces eclipsar al anterior, sin necesariamente destruirlo. Por ejemplo, IBM aún domina los mainframes y Microsoft el software para PC, pero ambos son mercados maduros que han sido superados por otros más nuevos y grandes basados en los servicios en línea, los móviles y la nube (Barwise y Watkins, 2018: 24).

Just as centralized military communication systems were vulnerable to nuclear attacks (and thus the Internet was developed to maintain communication even if there was a nuclear hit), an outdated “mainframe” model of health care delivery left many countries more vulnerable. Centering on hospitals, rather than care at home, public health and primary care was a key contributor to outbreaks worsening.

In 1991, when Apple started to talk about the hand-held computing devices called personal digital assistants, or PDAs, a lot of people both inside and outside Intel considered them a “10X” force capable of restructuring the PC industry. PDAs could do to PCs what PCs were doing to mainframes, many said. Not wanting to be blind to this possibility, we made a very substantial external investment and started a major internal effort to ensure that we would participate in any PDA wave in a big way. Then Apple’s Newton came out in 1993 and was promptly criticized for its failings. What does this say about the PDA phenomenon? Is it less of a “10X” force because its first instantiation was disappointing? When you think about it, first versions of most things usually are. Lisa, the first commercial computer with a graphical user interface and the predecessor of the Mac, did not receive good acceptance. Neither did the first version of Windows, which was considered an inferior product for years—DOS with a pretty face, as many called it. Yet graphical user interfaces in general, and Windows in particular, have become “10X” forces shaping the industry.

It consisted of a small unit with a keyboard and a monochrome 13” monitor. “Where’s the rest of it?” said Philo. “That’s the whole thing,” said the computer technician who was installing the machine. “Where’s the mainframe?” “There isn’t one. It uses a new type of chip called a microprocessor, right inside the keyboard unit. It runs at two megahertz and it has sixteen kilobytes of memory. This is one of the first off the production line.

This was, keep in mind, the tail end of the era of the mainframe computers, tape- and card-based data storage, & c., which now seems almost Flinstonianly remote.

Anytime you access the internet, by phone or computer, there are companies using special programs to capture your information. They monitor the websites you visit, the information you have posted, advertisements you have viewed, and store the information on massive mainframes, collecting data on your browsing history. This information collection includes buying habits, places you’ve purchased coffee, and restaurants you have visited. Years ago, one large Social Media site hired four hundred people to sit at computers and look at the pictures people were posting.

Disruptive technologies are dismissed as toys because when they are first launched they “undershoot” user needs. The first telephone could only carry voices a mile or two. The leading telco of the time, Western Union, passed on acquiring the phone because they didn’t see how it could possibly be useful to businesses and railroads—their primary customers. What they failed to anticipate was how rapidly telephone technology and infrastructure would improve (technology adoption is usually non-linear due to so-called complementary network effects). The same was true of how mainframe companies viewed the PC (microcomputer), and how modern telecom companies viewed Skype.

What in the name of Llar was that all about?’ Colin asked, his face still drained of colour. ‘I have no bloody idea,’ William said his voice quivering.

   ‘I see you made it Jack,’ he started to say, noticing a silver sphere roll across the loading bay floor. It stopped just short of his shoes before it exploded.

She stood panting as adrenalin fired up her muscles. Flipping open the safety catches on both of her laser pistols, she set them for maximum delivery. Anything or anyone on the receiving end of these weapons would never survive, even as atoms.

They worship machine logic above all, advocate a rigid way of life in which people are ruled by a computer’s calculations… a lot like Beta III was under Landru, in fact. We’ve had cultists come to the Federation consulate and pray to our mainframe.

It is hard to exaggerate what the company went through. It changed its strategy from selling products to providing customers with solutions. It changed its value proposition from offering beauty to improving return on investment (ROI). It changed its culture from top down to wide open. It changed the way it maintained quality from using audits to having process-based mechanisms. It changed its marketing philosophy from promoting what it made to creating what customers wanted. It changed its technology from a system built around an outmoded mainframe to one based on a state-of-the-art network.

Mainframe is dispersed among them all. Imagine millions of millions of tiny circuits like those in a card—billions of billions, actually. The warmth of each is less than the twinkle of a firefly; but there are so many that if they were packed together their own heat would destroy them. They would become a second sun. As things are it is always summer here, thanks to those circuits.” “That’s what you call the little wiggly gold lines in card?

Mainframe is dispersed among them all. Imagine millions of millions of tiny circuits like those in a card—billions of billions, actually. The warmth of each is less than the twinkle of a firefly; but there are so many that if they were packed together their own heat would destroy them. They would become a second sun. As things are it is always summer here, thanks to those circuits.

Mainframe knows everything that takes place here; as soon as I formulated my request, Mainframe took it under consideration. I’m delighted that it was granted, immensely grateful.

The first data-driven investigative story appeared in 1967, when Philip Meyer used social science methods and a mainframe computer to analyze data on race riots in Detroit for the Detroit Free Press. “One theory, popular with editorial writers, was that the rioters

26. Stress your guarantee. “Develop Software Applications Up to 6 Times Faster or Your Money Back.” 27. State the price. “Link 8 PCs to Your Mainframe—Only $2,395.” 28. Set up a seeming contradiction. “Profit from ‘Insider Trading’—100% Legal!” 29. Offer an exclusive the reader can’t get elsewhere. “Earn 500+% Gains with Little-Known ‘Trader’s Secret Weapon.’” 30. Address the reader’s concern. “Why Most Small Businesses Fail—and What You Can Do About It.” 31. “As Crazy as It Sounds…” “Crazy as It Sounds, Shares of This Tiny R&D Company, Selling for $2 Today, Could Be Worth as Much as $100 in the Not-Too-Distant Future.

Ninety feet directly beneath the center courtyard café in the middle of the Pentagon—previously known as the Ground Zero Cafe, because when the bomb dropped that was where it would most likely detonate—there is a deep subbasement office with ferroconcrete walls and a filtered air supply, accessible by discreet elevators and staircases from all five wings of the main building. It was designed as a deep command bunker back when the worst threats were raids by long-range Luftwaffe bombers bearing conventional explosives. Obsolescent since the morning of July 16, 1945—it won’t withstand a direct ground burst from an atom bomb, much less more modern munitions—it still possesses certain uses. Being deep underground and equidistant from all the other wings, it was well suited as a switch for SCAN, the Army’s automatic switched communications system, and later for AUTOVON. AUTOVON led to ARPANET, the predecessor of the internet, and the secure exchange in the basement played host to one of the first IMPs—Interface Message Processors—outside of academia. By the early 1980s a lack of rackspace led the DoD to relocate their hardened exchanges to a site closer to the 1950s-sized mainframe halls. And it was then that the empty bunker was taken over by a shadowy affiliate of the National Security Agency, tasked with waging occult warfare against the enemies of the nation. The past six months have brought some changes. There is a pentagonal main room inside the bunker, and within it there is a ceremonial maze, inscribed in blood and silver that glows with a soft fluorescence, converging on a dais at the heart of the design. The labyrinth takes the shape of a pentacle aligned with the building overhead: at each corner stands a motionless sentinel clad head to toe in occlusive silver fabric. Robed in black and crimson silk and shod in slippers of disturbingly pale leather, the Deputy Director paces her way through the maze. In her left hand she bears a jewel-capped scepter carved from the femur of a dead pope, and in her right hand she bears a gold-plated chalice made from a skull that once served Josef Stalin as an ashtray. As she walks she recites a prayer of allegiance and propitiation, its cadences and grammar those of a variant dialect of Old Enochian.

Moravec’s Paradox: it’s from the 1980s. Some computer scientist guy realized that, for computers, the hard stuff is easy and the easy stuff is hard. It’s trivial to teach a computer to win at chess. It’s insanely difficult to teach a computer basic common sense, or how to walk through unfamiliar environments, or have a normal conversation. The Spindle solved that: it’s a broadcast network of common sense and common processing skills for AI systems. It lets a robot walk around and interact with humans without needing, you know, a warehouse full of mainframes plugged into it at all times.

When I arrived at IBM, new mainframes were announced every four to five years. Today they are launched, on average, every eighteen months (with excellent quality, I might add). I can understand the joke that was going around IBM in the early 1990s: “Products aren’t launched at IBM. They escape.

The University of Michigan opened its new Computer Center in 1971, in a brand-new building on Beal Avenue in Ann Arbor, with beige-brick exterior walls and a dark-glass front. The university’s enormous mainframe computers stood in the middle of a vast white room, looking, as one faculty member remembers, “like one of the last scenes in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.” Off to the side were dozens of keypunch machines—what passed in those days for computer terminals. In 1971, this was state of the art. The University of Michigan had one of the most advanced computer science programs in the world, and over the course of the Computer Center’s life, thousands of students passed through that white room, the most famous of whom was a gawky teenager named Bill Joy.

Notice how big manufacturing companies like GE and IBM that were on the first list in 1955—and are still on it today—don’t talk as much about their mainframes and refrigerators and washing machines anymore? They talk about “providing digital solutions,” which is an admittedly jargony way of saying that the hardware is just a means to an end. In other words, these companies now focus on achieving outcomes for their clients, rather than just selling them equipment.

Is Willis Carrier an anomaly or not? The question has real political and social stakes, because the doxa of market capitalism as an unparalleled innovation engine has long leaned on stories like Willis Carrier’s miraculous cooling device as a cornerstone of its faith.6 In many respects, these beliefs made sense, because the implicit alternatives were the planned economies of socialism and communism. State-run economies were fundamentally hierarchies, not networks. They consolidated decision-making power in a top-down command system, which meant that new ideas had to be approved by the authorities before they could begin to spread through the society. Markets, by contrast, allowed good ideas to erupt anywhere in the system. In modern tech-speak, markets allowed innovation to flourish at the edges of the network. Planned economies were more like the old mainframe computer systems that predated the Internet, where every participant had to get authorization from a central machine to do new work. When Friedrich von Hayek launched his influential argument in the 1940s about the importance of price signals in market economies, he was observing a related phenomenon: the decentralized pricing mechanism of the marketplace allows an entrepreneur to gauge the relative value of his or her innovation. If you come up with an interesting new contraption, you don’t need to persuade a government commission of its value. You just need to get someone to buy it. Entire institutions and legal frameworks—not to mention a vast tower of conventional wisdom—have been built around the Carrier model of innovation. But what if he’s the exception and not the rule?

We discovered that low performers were more likely to say that the software they were building—or the set of services they had to interact with—was custom software developed by another company (e.g., an outsourcing partner). Low performers were also more likely to be working on mainframe systems.

Many computers and microprocessors use software preserved and recycled from the earliest days of computers, when memory space, at $600,000 per megabyte, was more valuable than gold. To save expensive space, the early programmers tracked dates with only the last two numbers of the year. This convention of employing two-digit date fields was carried over into most software employed in mainframe computers, and even found wide use in personal computers and so-called embedded chips, microprocessors that are used to control almost everything, from VCRs to car ignition systems, security systems, telephones, the switching systems that control the telephone network, process and control systems in factories, power plants, oil refineries, chemical plants, pipelines and much more. Thus, abbreviated into a two-digit field, the year 1999 would be “99.” The trouble is what happens when 00 comes up for

Those of a future generation will one day look back on printed books with the same benign and befuddled expressions that we use when we look at floppy disks or those colossal IBM mainframes with spinning reels of tape that you see in the background of the villain’s lair in James Bond movies. Books are bulky, and an individual book doesn’t hold much data compared to what an e-reader can hold.

WHEN I GOT BACK down to school in early December, I took Rafi and Ina up North of Green with me, to my little carrel on the second floor of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. I sat them down in front of my terminal, which had a direct Ethernet connection to the university’s networked mainframes.