IBM Mainframe Business Jumps 67% | Hacker News Reader

IBM Mainframe Business Jumps 67%

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48 pointsbelter17 comments

What jumps out at me is the use of the "constant currency" term. I do not think I have seen that before - Admittedly, I do not study a lot of financials. Is this something that we are going to see a lot of now, due to devaluation of the dollar?

It’s pretty common actually with Fortune 500 to report that way, and has been for a long time.

This is the standard for all financials, they just don't normally call it out as such.

It just means that they are assuming a fixed exchange rate for currencies over a period of time (often a month, quarter, or year), rather than reporting foreign income/holdings in current market value dollars.

I'm not an accountant, but I did do dev work for exactly this to align Netsuite with internal dashboards for reporting.

While many IBM products are beautifully designed, IBM also has a long tradition of dreadful implementations. JES3 and COLT (Canadian On-line Teller) come to mind.

IBM had a tradition of not allowing customers to fall down. JES3 took down a bank in Buffalo. Fortunately for the guilty a major snowstorm had shutdown the city for several days. IBM sent in SEs on snowmobiles.

COLT was even worse as it could throw a mainframe into an interrupt cascade. You had to press System Reset, then IPL and pick up the pieces of transactions. It took me a few months to identify where a register got mangled over an interrupt. This was pseudo reentrant code which I came to utterly despise.

I characterized the code as the result of student intern self abuse.

I spent several months flogging that dead horse until I changed jobs. There were later opportunities at other banks that saw COLT on my résumé that I refused.

In the current millennium, IBM has been serially fomenting payroll disasters with Phoenix as it's known in Canada (I don't know what it's called in Australia).

Interesting, I wonder why, I can only guess AI ? But I was unaware Mainframes were used for AI.

> But I was unaware Mainframes were used for AI.

IBM was front and center with AI long before the AI bubble.

- Watson won jeopardy in 2011. And IBM launched several successful AI products using the tech.

- Deep Blue beat Kasparov in chess in '97. They also had other NN-based systems for playing games.

Wasn't Watson basically a parlor trick though?

It wasn't a parlor trick and could have evolved into a useful product doing a small, basic subset of what LLMs do today. The problem was IBM's leadership didn't have the slightest understanding of the technology, thought they'd invented ChatGPT and pushed it into applications far beyond its potential, e.g. diagnosing cancer.

Yeah it kind of was. Watson was essentially an NLP search engine.

They should have made an MLP search engine. Those people will buy anything.

Deep Blue was also a bit of a parlor trick. It relied on a ton of special-purpose hardware - literally a rack of custom-made chess ICs. It's neat that it worked, but it didn't have any wider applicability.

Was, IBM hired me to teach watson law, what I saw as a mess, more management than developers. I was laid off 5 weeks after starting, the project was cancelled within the year

IBM is too dysfunctional to innovate like Big Tech has been

And yet Big Tech depends on technology owned by IBM, and also has luck the company isn't one that routinely does lawsuits due to patents.

Anything Red-Hat touches, like GNOME, GCC, Linux kernel, postman, anything Java is mostly done by Oracle, Red-Hat and IBM as the main ecosystem corporate drivers, PS3 used Cell,....

IBM is more often the subject of lawsuits from their employees

I'm 2nd gen, I remember the country clubs and IBM Santa. The company no longer cares about its people the way Watson father & son did.

> And yet Big Tech depends on technology owned by IBM

The opposite is true too. We live in a highly interdependent and interconnected world.

Neither were mainframes though, Watson and Deep Blue were both POWER systems.

Nothing do to with AI. Its the upgrade to the new Z Generation.

https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg248579.html https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg248579.pdf

Nobody dropping Mainframes.

The last 2 generations of IBM Z CPUs have "AI" inference acceleration built in. One of the use-cases was real-time credit-card fraud detection.

IBM also has a PCIe add-in card for AI called Spyre, that's also available for POWER11 systems.

https://www.ibm.com/new/announcements/telum-ii

https://research.ibm.com/blog/spyre-for-z

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