Technology

After announcing plans to acquire open source software provider Red Hat this week, IBM now plans to move its Watson Health cognitive services to a hybrid cloud model.

Watson, the IBM supercomputer that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze natural language and perform data analytics, has been used to identify medical data sources, generate hypotheses, recommend patient treatments to physicians or match patients to clinical trials.

The Veterans Administration has also used Watson for genomics as part of its precision oncology program, which primarily looks for possible new treatments for stage 4 cancer patients who have exhausted other options.

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Flashback to the mid-1960s, when the Control Data 6600 computer was the fastest thing going, according to this IT pilot fish who remembers it well.

"It was about 1 megaFLOPS," says fish. "The operator console, manned 24/7 of course, had two large, circular CRT screens, side-by-side, that almost always displayed operator messages scrolling up the screens. As long as those messages were scrolling, the operator seldom had to pay attention to them.

"But the CRTs were actually vector displays, capable of more, under program control.

"It's 2 o'clock in the morning. Halloween. Suddenly, the two screens go blank. Then two closed eyes appear. Slowly open. Eyeballs look slowly to the left, then slowly to the right -- then slowly stare straight ahead. Then eyelids slowly close, the two displays blank, and go back to scrolling plain text.

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