4 ms·
There is some more prize gibberish in that article: Saxena said IBM is ready to make a big a bet on Watson, as it did in the 1970s when it invested in the emer
by cstross 13y ago
There is some more prize gibberish in that article:
Saxena said IBM is ready to make a big a bet on Watson, as it did in the 1970s when it invested in the emergence of the mainframe.
Leaving aside the grammatical error (it's probably just an editing artefact), what bed did IBM make in the 1970s on the emergence of the mainframe? Is that a typo for 1950s? Or just unvarnished ignorance of computing history?
It's stuff like this that makes me mistrust a news source: if they get it blazingly wrong about something I know enough about to have a working bullshit detector for, what are the chances that they're not also getting it wrong about everything else?
- nl 13y agoTo be fair, the System/360 (which was the first to run the classic OS/360 operating system) was released in '64[1], and was replaced in the '70s by the S/370. Certainly mainframes were in use prior to the '70s, but the S/360 was the first "classic" mainframe in that it was designed for both business & scientific use[2], and it wasn't until the 70's that they began to become more popular in areas outside their traditional use. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360 [2]