PC Turns 30 (IBM 5150)

The IBM PC (Model 5150) was released on August 12, 1981. It turned 30 today.

This is a little homage to the computer I grew up with. It was our household computer from 1981 until 1993. It is, as you can see, still working today.

This is the High Definition update to the half-hazard video I poster here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3aqJQPQKhs

For the real geeks out there, this machine has been heavily upgraded over the course of its lifetime. Gone are the two full-height floppy drives, replaced with half-height units and a half-height 20MB hard disk. It has 512KB of RAM installed in a full length ISA slot.

This machine ran applications like dBase III and Wordstar 2000. Games played on it included Sierra's Space Quest and Accolade's Test Drive, along with any number of text-mode games from BBSs run by dudes at the local high school.

This IBM PC never knew the Internet, but I think they'd get along just fine.

5MB IBM hard disk drive from 1956

5 MB is not much. It is amazing i have a drive that is 5 times that capacity on my keychain.

IBM 350 disk storage unit [via] BoingBoing

Watson Didn’t Crash During Jeopardy Taping Despite Reports

Watson, the IBM gaming computer, has finished its stint on Jeopardy, and trounced the human contestants on the game show. The human players were the famed human champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Apparently, the PBS show Nova did a piece on Watson and one of the producers of that story Michael Bicks noted on a chat about the program that Watson crashed during taping.

Bicks noted that it took over four hours to tape the show thanks to the delays with Watson. However, Bicks came back later and announced that he had misspoken and it wasn’t Watson that crashed, rather the interface between Watson and the Jeopardy computers. The crash was unrelated to Watson, and it’s not clear if that interface was an IBM machine or something that Jeopardy was using. It’s impressive that Watson was able to beat the humans so easily.

Why is it that I can’t think of Jeopardy without a couple things popping to mind? Things like “Suck it Trebek!” and Weird Al always come to mind.

[via CNET]

Smartest Machine on Earth to Take on Jeopardy! Grand Champions

This week, an episode of NOVA covered Watson, the IBM supercomputer designed to interpret and understand natural human language, with all its ambiguity: wordplay, puns, double-meanings, intuitive differentiations and subtlety. Watson, named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, is the result of the DeepQA Project, the goal of which is to create a computer system that can “deliver precise, meaningful responses, and synthesize, integrate, and rapidly reason over the breadth of human knowledge as it is most rapidly and naturally produced — in natural language text.” IBM believes (and is exhibiting rather impressively) that this may be achieved through a combination of advancements in natural language processing, information retrieval (from millions of stored documents), machine learning, knowledge representation and reasoning, processed simultaneously through parallel computations. The ultimate test of IBM’s research? A show-down episode of Jeopardy!, wherein Watson takes on Ken Jennings, the show’s 74-game champion, and Brad Rutter, the all-time monetary winner of the game. It airs Monday, February 14, 2011.

Link to video: http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/what-is-watson/why-jeopardy.html

While frequently compared to the chess-playing Deep Blue, a win by Watson on Monday will be a profoundly deeper and more complex advancement for computer science. Rather than thinking in a single-task environment with a well-defined list of rules—as Deep Blue did—Watson’s ability to compute and process information in a way that rivals human intelligence is a step toward building the holy grail of sci-fi technology: real AI. Regardless of the outcome of Monday’s game, Watson’s development signals the beginning of a new era of systems design and analytics, one in which computers learn from mistakes and accurately interpret the amorphous nature of human language. The applications of such systems are seemingly limitless, with improvements in healthcare, education, finance and data management already under development at IBM.

I’m willing to say with 75% confidence that Watson will win against Jennings and Rutter. What do you think, GAS fans?

IBM Centennial Film: 100 Years of IBM [Video]

A short film featuring one hundred people, who each present the IBM achievement recorded in the year they were born, from the oldest person to the youngest one. Enjoy!

[Via Reddit]