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Tech News
A demoscene programmer has released a detailed write-up explaining how they built 8088 Domination, a program that plays full-motion video on a 1981 IBM PC 5150 using its composite TV output. The post traces the project's roots to earlier demos, including 2004's 8088 Corruption, which used 40x25 text mode to work around the hardware's severe memory and processing limits.
Developer Nicholas Carlini built a custom port of the Stockfish chess engine running on a 200 MHz Intel Pentium Pro from November 1995, estimating its playing strength at roughly 3300 Elo versus Kasparov's near-2800 rating in 1996. He connected the vintage machine to the internet via a Realtek Ethernet card so the public can play against it directly.
Survival LLM is a free, open-source application that runs an AI assistant and a large offline reference library directly on a user's computer, requiring internet access only for initial setup. The tool answers emergency-related questions—such as water purification or burn treatment—by citing passages from included sources like FEMA guidance, CDC materials, survival manuals and roughly 930,000 Wikipedia articles. It automatically selects an AI model sized to the user's available memory, ranging from an 80GB model for high-memory Macs to a 6GB model for lower-spec machines.
OpenAI announced on October 19th that its latest AI models show improved ability to migrate old software written in legacy languages like COBOL into modern code. The company says this could help organizations maintain and modernize aging systems still embedded in banking, government and other critical infrastructure.
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna told investors on the company's Q3 earnings call that open weight AI models, which scored far below closed frontier models in 2024 benchmarks, have closed much of that performance gap by late 2025. He said open models now deliver roughly 90 percent of frontier model performance at 10 to 25 percent of the token cost, and argued this makes them suitable for most routine enterprise tasks like summarizing emails or reviewing contracts.
The piece traces LISP implementations that fit within extremely small memory budgets, starting with the original 1960 LISP on MIT's IBM 704, which used 32K words of 36-bit core with the LISP system itself taking 12K words, leaving under 20K cons cells. It also cites 1964's PDP-1 LISP, which ran on systems with just 4096 words of 18-bit storage, with the system consuming roughly 2000 words.
IBM reported third-quarter adjusted earnings of $2.95 per share on revenue of $17.10 billion, both ahead of analyst expectations. Net income rose to $2.19 billion from $1.74 billion a year earlier, with software revenue up 8% to $7.80 billion. IBM also raised its full-year free cash flow guidance to an increase of more than $1 billion, up from the roughly $1 billion improvement it had forecast in July.
A Figma engineer investigated a user-reported quirk where Shift+2 worked differently depending on whether it was pressed via the main keyboard or the numeric keypad, but only on Windows. The investigation traced the behavior back to keyboard layout decisions IBM made starting with its 1977 System/34 and carried forward through the Datamaster and the original IBM PC.
A hobbyist's 1994 IBM ThinkPad 750C, built around a 33MHz 486SL processor, now fails to boot normally and throws an I9990303 error that also blocks entry into BIOS setup. The machine can still boot DOS or Windows 3.1 from special maintenance floppies and access its hard disk, but configuration tools like the PS2 utility fail. IBM's documentation links the code to a faulty system board or corrupted flash ROM, and attempts to re-flash the BIOS fail with a power-management error before even checking battery status.
A technology retrospective recounts the history of Token Ring, the IBM-backed networking standard introduced on October 15, 1985, which competed with Ethernet through the 1980s and 1990s. The piece explains that while Token Ring avoided collisions by passing a single token between systems and handled network saturation well, it required all cards to run at the same speed and was ultimately outcompeted by cheaper, open-standard Ethernet equipment.
IBM's Institute for Business Value surveyed 2,000 CEOs across 33 countries and found 61% say their organizations are actively adopting or scaling AI agents, including in performance testing. Yet the same study found only 25% of AI initiatives have delivered expected returns and just 16% have scaled enterprise-wide, meaning much of the performance-testing use case remains unproven despite broad adoption intent.
Cockroach Labs reports that an autonomous system of coding agents built Db2 database migration support for its MOLT tool between a Wednesday and Friday in April, without any human writing code. The work included a new schema converter, data-fetching and verification paths, and over ten thousand lines of test fixtures, costing $4,172 in token usage. The company says this compares to nine months and roughly $160,000 in engineering time spent adding similar Oracle support in 2024.