Word: ibm
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Garry Kasparov, the best chess player in the world and quite possibly the best chess player who ever lived, sat down across a chessboard from a machine, an IBM computer called Deep Blue, and lost...
Controllers trace the troubles back to 1981, the year Ronald Reagan decided to break their union rather than meet its demands for better pay, benefits and safety measures. The FAA fired all 11,000 striking controllers, then contracted with IBM to deliver a system of high-tech computers that would rule the skies. "Rather than incremental changes, they tried to reinvent the system," says Mike Connor, NATCA's director of safety and technology. "They were trying to computerize everything, but you can't computerize human reasoning or decision making." After investing $2 billion and watching the projected costs balloon from...
Meanwhile, the aging systems continue to deteriorate. "We are holding some of this equipment together with bubble gum and baling wire," says Pete Acadeno, a technician at New York's terminal radar approach control. Such heavily trafficked air centers as New York and Chicago rely on the IBM 9020E, a mainframe computer of 1960s vintage. Unlike modern computers, with their tidy array of microchips, this dinosaur is stuffed with thousands and thousands of feet of wire. "The technicians tell us the wires are so brittle they sometimes break when you just touch them," says Mark Scholl, president of the Chicago...
When that happens, there are ever fewer people to do the repairs. Many of the technicians acquainted with the 9020E's innards have long since retired. "We are down to two trained technicians specialized in the IBM 9020E in New York Center," says Henry Brown, a power-systems technician. The FAA has tried to hire contract workers. But, says Acadeno, "a contract technician is not going to come to work in a snowstorm." And those who finally do show up are trained to work with microprocessors, not primitive circuit boards...
...smallish room in the Philadelphia convention center, world chess champion Garry Kasparov continues his chess struggle against IBM's Deep Blue computer. With the six-game match tied at 2-2 heading in Friday's game, the match has if nothing else served as a demonstration that brute computer power can at least equal the best that humans have to offer, says TIME's William Dowell. "Kasparov personally evaluated Deep Blue's performance as ranging somewhere between 2300 and 3000 depending on circumstances. Kasparov's own chess rating is 2750. The best computer before Kasparov was somewhere around 2300." Although...