New year and new beginnings, but before I kick off the new year I’m going to provide a quick look back at what happened during the year that’s passed.

• Fulfilled one of my childhood dreams and begun working for IBM.
• Bought a car.
• Decided I needed a drivers license and begun taking driving lessons.
• Found shopping at eBay and bought some cool stuff and a new server, IBM of course.
• Became a proud owner of a DEC PDP-11.
• Had the opportunity to see a DEC TOPS 20 at University of Uppsala.
• Thanks to my new job at IBM I had the honor to meet a bunch of IBM System Z mainframes in real life.
• Got acquaint with IBM AIX and IBM PowerSystems servers.
• Had one of the rooms at home become my computer collection room (a.k.a. the computer museum) .
• Bought an old Rital server rack for my computer collection room.

Well, that’s pretty much the interesting parts of my 2011 and I hope that 2012 takes on the challenge to top that. However there’s one thing more important than everything else, I managed to not scare away my fiance and my friends by being my crazy self. Since I had them drive me around and carry my heavy computers I’m grateful they haven’t told me to fsck off.

As supposed even I have a few new years resolutions, some more private than others. Two I can share with all of you is that I’ll be working hard to get my drivers license and the other is the same as I have given every year for a long time and that is to learn something new every day.

At last, but not least I want to wish you all a Happy New Year!!!

IBM has it’s roots back in the 1880s, but it was on June 16th 1911 the company Computing Tabulating Recording (CTR) Corporation, that would become International Business Machines Corporation, was founded. CTR was incorporated in Endicott, New York, USA through a merge of four different companies. These were the Tabulating Machine Company (with origins in Washington, D.C in the 1880s), the International Time Recording Company (founded in Endicott, New York in 1900), the Computing Scale Corporation (founded in Dayton, Ohio in 1901) and the Bundy Manufacturing Company (founded in 1889).

Through this merge CTR became a company with a wide range of products such as employee-time-keeping systems, weighing scales, automatic meat slicers and coffee grinders. There was one more product that would become very important for the development of the IT industry, the punched card equipment, which originally came from the Tabulating Machine Company. However, CTR ended up a company with 1300 employees and offices and plants in Endicott and Binghamton, New York; Dayton, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; Washington, D.C; and Toronto, Ontario.

Today IBM has it’s headquarter in Armonk, Town of North Castle, New York since 1964 and the building complex is an amazing 26300 square meters. The IBM brand was in 2010 valued to $64.7 billions and the company is highly ranked on many lists such as Fortune, Forbes, Interbrand and others. IBM employs over 350 000 people around the world and around 3300 of them are located in Sweden.

Over the years until this day IBM has contributed more to the development of IT and many other areas than anyone could ever imagine and continues to invests $5-6 million in research every year. Among IBM’s contribution with we find programming languages, relational databases, DRAM memory, RISC processors and a total of four IBM employees has been rewarded the Nobel price for their research.

Among IBM’s server platforms we find System/390 which is now known as System z and the RS/6000 AIX platform (later known as System p) that’s been merged with the AS/400 platform (later known as System i) to become Power Systems. Both the System z and the Power Systems platform has the ability to partition hardware providing true hardware virtualization, a heritage from the mainframe platforms. IBM also develops the supercomputer Blue Gene which in 2009 was rewarded with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation by U.S. President Barack Obama.

Lately IBM has gained worldwide attention for their artificial intelligence project Watson that was exhibited on the game show Jeopardy! where it won against the game show champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.

If anyone haven’t figured it out yet (hence the counter on my website) I’m proud and honored to become an IBMer in September this year and to join IBM on their continuous journey and challenge to build a smarter planet.