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If you listen to IBM, they would say:

Popular software product lines

        * CICS
        * Cognos
        * DB2
        * FileNet
        * IMS
        * Informix
        * InfoSphere
        * Lotus
        * Rational
        * SPSS
        * System z
        * Tivoli
        * WebSphere

Now, as to whether any or all of these products or product lines are actually "popular" in terms of market share, user count, or gross revenue, I have no idea.

"So learning to program because your employer requires it is not necessarily a bad thing for both the company and the employee."

A) I am certain they laid off un-needed people who they didn't think could cut the muster as programmers.
B) By your own admission they had those people cease all other responsibilities and focus on learning the new skill for two years.
C) What popular software product does IBM sell these days ? (after waiting for their website for a couple of minutes I gave up waiting. It hasn't even thrown a server timeout error)

IBM Power 595 http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/595/specs.html weighs about 3400 pounds.

One time, I asked a IBM guy why their servers weigh so much. He replied (jokingly) that if it didn't, all the fans would make it hover.

The Hollerith Machine was developed for the task of processing the massive amounts of data for the census in the United States. It was the only solution in the world that could handle the job. Decades later, Germany was using these machines for its own census. Most of the data the Nazis compiled with IBM's technology was between 1934 and 1939. While the Nazis were collecting this information to track "undesirables," IBM was so proud of itself it had a plaque affixed to greet visitors to its Madison Ave (NY) headquarters in 1938 which read: WORLD PEACE THROUGH WORLD TRADE.

If you want "professional" you can buy Rational Application Developer for Linux from IBM for USD $2,280.00. It is basically Eclipse anointed by IBM for corporate dolts like you. Guess what even people at Microsoft working on the really hard problems like OS development use Emacs and Vim. You may continue to delude yourself.

"Your solution appears to be, "Do exactly what we've been doing, just more."

No. His solution is that people need to start doing it. You're solution is to ignore solid secure programming practices. In other words, your solution is to keep failing to practice secure programming.

"Some new approaches work better, some work worse, but we already know exactly what the old approach accomplishes."

Right. And we have also seen what doesn't work. Another way to say it is: "What we've got here is failure to communicate. Some men you just can't reach. So you get what we have here now, which is the way Microsoft wants it... well, Bill Gates gets it. I don't like it any more than you men."

IMHO, Apple would have scored a lot of points by making Rosetta open-source.

If by "would have scored a lot of points" you mean "would have gotten a visit from the lawyers from the new owners of Transitive Corporation", Transitive Corporation being the suppliers of the binary-to-binary translation code in Rosetta, yes, they would have.

I.e., it wasn't entirely theirs to open-source. Maybe IBM could've been convinced to open-source it, but I'm not sure how interested IBM would be in something that translates code from one of their instruction-set architectures to x86, as opposed to going the other way (which is why they were interested in Transitive).

IBM no longer rates their servers in MIPS, actually. They rate them in PCIs and rPerfs and CPWs.

IBM no longer rates their servers in MIPS, actually. They rate them in PCIs and rPerfs and CPWs.

Where does IBM rate their machine in MIPS?

In the IBM zEnterprise z196 server overview:

The zEnterprise 196 (z196) is a workload optimized system, that can scale up (over 52,000 MIPS in a single footprint), scale out (80 configurable cores) and scale within (specialty engines, cryptographic processors, hypervisors) executing in an environmentally friendly footprint. ...

and in the IBM zEnterprise EC12 Technical Guide:

The zEC12 is designed with improved scalability, performance, security, resiliency, availability, and virtualization. The superscalar design allows the zEC12 to deliver a record level of capacity over the prior System z servers. It is powered by 120 of the world’s most powerful microprocessors running at 5.5 GHz and is capable of executing more than 75,000 millions of instructions per second (MIPS). The zEC12 Model HA1 is estimated to provide up to 50% more total system capacity than the z196 Model M80.

for example.

Where does IBM rate their machine in MIPS?

In the IBM zEnterprise z196 server overview:

The zEnterprise 196 (z196) is a workload optimized system, that can scale up (over 52,000 MIPS in a single footprint), scale out (80 configurable cores) and scale within (specialty engines, cryptographic processors, hypervisors) executing in an environmentally friendly footprint. ...

and in the IBM zEnterprise EC12 Technical Guide:

The zEC12 is designed with improved scalability, performance, security, resiliency, availability, and virtualization. The superscalar design allows the zEC12 to deliver a record level of capacity over the prior System z servers. It is powered by 120 of the world’s most powerful microprocessors running at 5.5 GHz and is capable of executing more than 75,000 millions of instructions per second (MIPS). The zEC12 Model HA1 is estimated to provide up to 50% more total system capacity than the z196 Model M80.

for example.

Here are some things that IBMs customers care about, where are the Core i7 Extreme numbers for these?

How many CICS transactions can I process per second? How many IMS updates?

Well, you're unlikely to get numbers for the first of those, given that IBM apparently killed off CICS for Windows and I'm not sure which x86 UN*Xes, if any, got versions of CICS. I'm not sure to what extent TXSeries for Multiplatforms would let you, for example, run CICS on Windows Server or Linux.

As for the second, as far as I know, IBM's never ported IMS to any non-mainframe OS.

How about DB2 transactions?

About 13,000 XML transactions per second in at least one benchmark - but those were Xeons, not Cores (server rather than desktop/laptop processors).

Here are some things that IBMs customers care about, where are the Core i7 Extreme numbers for these?

How many CICS transactions can I process per second? How many IMS updates?

Well, you're unlikely to get numbers for the first of those, given that IBM apparently killed off CICS for Windows and I'm not sure which x86 UN*Xes, if any, got versions of CICS. I'm not sure to what extent TXSeries for Multiplatforms would let you, for example, run CICS on Windows Server or Linux.

As for the second, as far as I know, IBM's never ported IMS to any non-mainframe OS.

How about DB2 transactions?

About 13,000 XML transactions per second in at least one benchmark - but those were Xeons, not Cores (server rather than desktop/laptop processors).

Modern SSD, FC, ethernet and inifiniband connections on x86 are light years beyond the mainframe.

Are they behind the Fibre Channel, Ethernet, and Infiniband connectors in the zEC12 mainframe? (Presumably by "SSD" you mean something other than "solid state drive", given that a "solid state drive" is a type of secondary storage, not a connector.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_z196_(microprocessor)

Actually, the z196 is the microprocessor in the previous generation. An IBM paper on the zEC12 refers to the new microprocessor as the "zEC12 processor chip" or just "the zEC12 chip". As they're not selling it on the open market, there's not much reason to give the processor chip its own name, independent from the name of the systems in which it's being used.

L3 is 48MB, (see p. 43), not GB as The Register had it, thanks for noticing that.

No, that's not a correct supposition -- quite the opposite, actually. All processors, including Intel X86, use microcode (or what IBM calls millicode) to a degree.

At least from what I've read about the past few generations of S/3x0 chips, millicode is more like PALcode on the Alpha processor than like traditional microcode, i.e. it's a combination of regular machine code and processor-specific instructions that access specialized registers etc., running in a special processor mode with (presumably) fast entry and exit, support for said processor-specific instructions (which presumably trap in either both "problem state", i.e. user mode, and "supervisor state", i.e. kernel mode), and its own bank of general-purpose registers (part of the "fast entry and exit"). Instructions implemented in millicode trap to millicode routines that implement them.

What IBM called "microcode" rather than "millicode" was implemented using processor-specific instructions completely different from the machine's instruction set (instructions often having fields that directly controlled gates).

(And then there's System/38 and the pre-PowerPC AS/400, where the processor instruction set was a CISC instruction set implemented using microcode, and where the compilers available to customers generated code in an extremely CISCy instruction set that the low levels of the OS translated into machine code and ran. For legal reasons - they didn't want to have to be required to make the low-level OS code available to "plug-compatible manufacturers", i.e. cloners - they not only called the microcode that implemented the processor instruction set "microcode" ("horizontal microcode", as it probably was "fields directly control gates"-style horizontal microcode), they also called the aforementioned low level OS code "microcode" as well, even though it ran from main memory and its instruction set was the instruction set that was actually executed in application code ("vertical microcode"), and had the group working on that code report to a manager in the hardware group. See Frank Soltis's Inside the AS/400.)

IBM knows it well. After all, they invented microcode/millicode in the System/360 in 1965.

"Invented", no; the paper generally considered to have introduced the concept was "Microprogramming and the Design of the Control Circuits in an Electronic Digital Computer", by Maurice Wilkes and J. B. Stringer, from 1953. S/360 may have been the first line of computers to use microcode in most of the processors (S/360 Model 75 was, I think, implemented completely in hardwired logic).

Very cutting edge -- so cutting edge I've got to crack open some engineering manuals to try to figure out what they've done, although they probably need to write those manuals.

Well, for the previous generation, there's Volume 56, Issue 1.2 of the IBM Journal of Research and Development has some papers on the z196, but, alas, not for free online. They may publish an issue on the zEC12 at some point.

I have used quite a few languages which use GC and even though some are quite mature now, like VW Smalltalk, all of them freeze on a regular basis, just when you don't want it to happen. I have also used and developed large-scale systems which do not have this trait, and all of them were done in C or C++ and they use explicit allocation or reference-counted memory management.

1. VW Smalltalk uses a full (non-generational) tracing collector which makes no pretenses of being low-latency, let alone realtime.

2. Refcounting is a kind of GC, not something different; mark-sweep is the other most common algorithm, but it's a mistake to refer to any one method as "garbage collection" at the expense of others.

3. If you want to look at real-word implementations, Lua and squeak are probably the two most prevalent systems that use realtime GC (squeak is only mostly there--doing weird things in destructors can make it not real-time). OCaml is 2nd-generation incremental, which is not realtime but is low-latency in the common case.

Lua added incremental GC as of version 5.1 mainly because it's seeking to be used as an extension language in games which have pretty rigorous soft realtime requirements.

IBM's Metronome (AKA Websphere Realtime) is a realtime JVM that's seen a fair amount of use in the real world. It uses a newer algorithm by Bacon (who's mentioned above) that's completely hard realtime and fits the constraints of the JVM. http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_project.php?id=174

I don't see the OP saying anything about "no computers", just that the F1 engine was designed on blackboards and drafting tables, which appears to be generally accurate. It's a >50-year old design.

Apparently use of IBM computers in rocket design goes back to the 50's and the Redstone rocket. However I'm not sure what computations were performed during the Redstone or F1 design. Maybe it was to numerically solve some differential equations that were first laid out on a blackboard (to avoid having to use the manual processes that were used in the Manhattan Project). Maybe it was for analysis of test data during the years it took to analyze the combustion instability problems of the F1. Nevertheless, the computational capability of the 36-bit word, 40Kips IBM 704 was pretty limited and its use would have been similarly limited. They wouldn't have been using it for finite element structural analysis, 3D combustion simulations, or any of the other kinds of CAE tools possible with modern supercomputers. If they had had those kinds of tools available, F1 development very likely wouldn't have taken 7 years. Applying modern CAE tools and computer power to an F1 redesign could provide new insights, or allow retrofitting capabilities such as thrust throttling, which would have been beyond the computing capabilities of 50's engineers.

The very first time I saw an on-screen keyboard, I knew it would never be more than a low-throughput device. I rooted for other screen-based input solutions, but Apple never let them be used as the default interface. Some of them actually worked quite well: I was able to get to 50wpm using the IBM SHARK input method with an afternoon's practice.

A quick google turns up this: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/green_and_sustainability/nextsteps/solution/N500945X17585D04.html

Maybe they can make the planet smarter . . . but the folks driving cars seem to be getting dumber.

Linux is not for the lazy....plain and simple.

Sure it is! I am very lazy and one of the things I like about Linux is that I don't have to fuss with it. I set things up the way I like and they stay that way. And it's also nice that if I really wanted to go to the effort, I could set up cron to do certain things automatically for me.

Heck, I was as pleased as punch when I attached a printer to my first X86 Linux install and it configured it without me doing anything. Sure it might have been a little less fun than actually pulling up cups or whatever, but it was nice to not have to even bother.

And let me point you to an IBM page called "Lazy Linux: 10 essential tricks for the admins":

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-10sysadtips/

Not AI enough? - http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/index.html

http://www.research.ibm.com/

They used to have one of the most amazing IT geek magazines.

At one point at school I was using Charlotte a text mode webbrowser on a mainframe. I also maintained a price list on our webserver, and I had to test on Charlotte to make sure it was readable there.

Surprisingly it seems to still exist and updated shockingly recently.

Most. Badass. Article. Title. Ever.

Well, the title of the actual article is "Microbots Made of Bubbles Have Engines Made of Lasers" which sounds even cooler to me. :-P

This reminds me of when IBM did something similar with a fancy electron microscope or something like that quite a while back.

Doing it with bubbles and lasers sounds totally cool, and makes me really want to see the first mechanical application of this. That's gotta get you something seriously cool, right?

Back in the day, Thomas Watson made the case for THINK-ing: "And we must study through reading, listening, discussing, observing and thinking. We must not neglect any one of those ways of study. The trouble with most of us is that we fall down on the latter -- thinking -- because it's hard work for people to think, And, as Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler said recently, 'all of the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think.'"

Linux depends on gcc-specific extensions, and not just typedefs but exact layout in memory (which C doesn't specify), in-line assembly syntax http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-gcc-hacks/

Do you need something tough and don't care about the price? Get an IBM POS (ok, now Toshiba) or the IBM Kiosk. URL seems to be broken now. http://www-03.ibm.com/products/retail/kiosk/industries/retail.html

Note, especially, the human death rate per Terrawatt-hour of energy produced here: http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visualizations/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-sources and look at the bottom of the graph on the right (consistent with http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html which has discussion attached to the numbers).

Now redo the chart for deaths in the 5 mile radius around the power plant, and you will have your answer. Nuclear deaths are usually in the vicinity of the plant, and happen in bunches. Its like 9/11 and people are willing to accept an increase in the chances of cancer to avoid another 9/11.

> Would these locations prefer a windmill farm or coal fired plant.

Oh, wow. This is the most blatant example of a false dichotomy I have seen for days. There are many other options, all of them more practical. Note, especially, the human death rate per Terrawatt-hour of energy produced here: http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visualizations/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-sources and look at the bottom of the graph on the right (consistent with http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html which has discussion attached to the numbers). This is a rate lower than even that of wind, but there's a more important reason that this method is much better than wind: it's the only alternative to coal that can meet all of the world's energy needs as developing world per-capita usage energy use explodes to match that of the developed nations. You can't cover every square mile of the planet with wind towers.

Yeah I'm sure that the public sector arm of IBM has more than a few people with Phd's in urban planning working for them if it's a market they take seriously. Oh, and a quick Google found these two examples of phd's in urban planning working for IBM...

[citation provided]

Ha, while looking for that, I found this , here.

[citation provided]

Ha, while looking for that, I found this , here.

the new CIO, Virginia Rometty was the executive that brought IBM into the services era.

I would have to say the biggest driver of IBM hardware sales is the service arm. While they will accept anything as part of a DataCenter move, the refresh cycle is geared towards replacing with IBM hardware. The lower cost and maintenance schedule usually seals the deal. So really the only hardware that makes sense is midrange to Mainframe. Commodity is right out.

From the Q1 financial report this afternoon:
http://www.ibm.com/investor/1q12/press.phtml?lnk=w3

Systems and Technology revenue down 7 percent, 6 percent adjusting for currency; -hardware

  vrs

Software revenue up 5 percent, 7 percent adjusting for currency;
Services revenue up 1 percent:
Services pre-tax income up 11 percent;

Total systems revenues decreased 6 percent (down 6 percent, adjusting for currency). Revenues from Power Systems were flat compared with the 2011 period. Revenues from System x were also flat. Revenues from System z mainframe server products decreased 25 percent compared with the year-ago period. Total delivery of System z computing power, as measured in MIPS (millions of instructions per second), decreased 5 percent. Revenues from System Storage decreased 4 percent, and revenues from Retail Store Solutions decreased 13 percent year over year. Revenues from Microelectronics OEM decreased 13 percent.

Posting AC as I am a sometimes contractor there.

"can be smaller", but won't.

IPv4 header: "Variable length of 20-60 bytes, depending on IP options present." (if you don't use any options, 20 bytes).

IPv6 header: "Fixed length of 40 bytes. There are no IP header options." (if you don't use any options either, 40 bytes)

IPv6 is terrible if those "20 bytes more" are relevant for your application.

Src: http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/iseries/v5r3/index.jsp?topic=%2Frzai2%2Frzai2compipv4ipv6.htm

None of the IBM z/Architecture microprocessors (or their ESA/390 and prior predecessors) are listed yet. So Stanford is only missing the highest clock speed CPU ever created in the entire history of computing to date -- the IBM z196 microprocessor. Which seems like a rather serious and obvious omission. Also a bit insulting, since IBM has been announcing their new z/Architecture microprocessor breakthroughs exclusively first at Stanford's own "Hot Chips" conference for several years now. (Ooops.)

Not true. The LTO tape will outlast the heads on most drives. Read the IBM whitepaper on the 3580 drives. http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp3580.pdf

Actually, most people who use tapes in an Enterprise environment use tape libraries that will shuffle the tapes around like a juke box.

This one holds 48 tapes. quote - "The TS3200, featuring Ultrium 5 tape drives, has a capacity of up to 72 TB native (144 TB with 2:1 compression)."

Tape libraries are great for backup, hard drives as good as they are, are still very fragile compared to tapes. You dont appreciate this until your boss runs over a backup tape taking them home, then you spool it onto a new cartridge and it still reads. As Murphy's law would have it, a user lost a file on the same day as the tape fell out of his bag :)

The big problem with tapes is that they are slower, so to get the 70 odd TB of data you need to back up in 24 hours or less you have to run a few tape drives.

That being said, I'd like an LTO tape drive for home backups but cant afford a drive.

LTO-6 is not available yet. When available, each cartridge will hold up to 3.2 TB uncompressed. (I can make up practically any figure I want for compressed data capacity. It just depends on the type of data and the compression algorithm.) That's not bad, but IBM's TS1140 tape drive has been available since June, 2011. It supports tape cartridges that each hold up to 4.0 TB uncompressed. The Oracle StorageTek T10000C tape drive supports cartridges that each hold up to 5 TB uncompressed. It depends on what you're doing -- raw storage capacity per cartridge is certainly not the only relevant specification -- but there are interesting choices.

Actually, most people who use tapes in an Enterprise environment use tape libraries that will shuffle the tapes around like a juke box.

This one holds 48 tapes. quote - "The TS3200, featuring Ultrium 5 tape drives, has a capacity of up to 72 TB native (144 TB with 2:1 compression)."

http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/user/pan/pan.html

"Scientists at IBM's Almaden Research Center (San Jose, CA) are perfecting a new Personal Area Network technology that uses the natural electrical conductivity of the human body to transmit electronic data.

Using a small prototype transmitter (roughly the size of a deck of cards) embedded with a microchip, and a slightly larger receiving device, the researchers can transmit a pre-programmed electronic business card between two people via a simple handshake. Whats more, the prototype allows data to be transmitted from sender to receiver through up to four touching bodies."

Anyways, the brain is mapped to atomic level : for the most part, you would have a map of where every single atom originally was in the brain.

At this scale the Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle will wreak havoc with your measurements. Besides, it is not enough to know where atoms are. You also need to know what those atoms are, and what bonds exist (or do not exist) between those atoms. For example, you have an ideal plane with these atoms:

H H
O O
H H

This can produce two water molecules (H2O) or two Hydrogen molecules (H2) and one oxygen molecule (O2.) Decoding bonds requires statistical observation of electrons because old man Heisenberg is in full control at this level. This means that you need to know details not on atomic level but on subatomic level. Forget about that "tiny arm" - it can't be made of anything because the probe has to be smaller than the probed object. And electrons are quite small. Doing such measurements in parallel, billions of trillions per second, is not exactly easy, given that today's science has to spend a lot of effort on imaging of just one molecule. Since the brain is a 3D object this becomes even more difficult. You need to count protons and neutrons in the nucleus, and then you need to determine the 3D position of electrons to figure out the bonds. The "tiny arm" that you need must be made from protons, perhaps... but be careful near those electrons, lest they jump ship.

This of course is not practical. Not only encoding of that much data is not possible (now or in the far future). It is also largely pointless because to reverse the process (to encode the data into a non-biological replica system) you need to figure out the configuration of biological data and then translate it into a matching configuration of machine data. Even if you can recover all the super-complex organics, with all their folding and such, you still need to know what the hell all that means.

In other words, your machine can at best produce a copy of the tissue. If that brain was dying from old age, the copy will be also dying from old age. This is because you, as a copier, don't understand what you are copying and cannot make small selective changes. In today's terms you need an OCR. But we don't have a decent OCR even for texts that we print ourselves! A recognition engine that starts with positions of electrons and nuclei and produces excitation data for a neural network is hard to imagine. As I understand, Star Trek transporters weren't capable of such a thing; they only could do copying, just as our paper copiers of today do. A machine that can scan a brain and produce the pure mind is pretty much far-fetched.

If you ask me, the easiest way to transfer human mind into a machine is by creating implants. Those implants would grow and eventually become an integral part of the brain. Being neuron-like in all aspects, they will contain a proportional share of your mind - and if they are allowed to grow further they will replace most of your neurons. Once that happens you can read their state, or you can connect them to a larger array of mechanical neurons. Then you can stop the clock of your brain, atomically transfer the mind into the machine, and then you can either resume the clock in the body (and become a copy) or you can discard the body and live as a machine intelligence from now on. Of course since the body's brain is programmable, you can always return into it, or someone else can do it. Or you can make a purely mechanical body - any old man will gladly accept that.

This method eliminates the need to decode chemicals and charges; all you need to know is the state of neurons and the connectivity - and that will be a digital readout, as accurate as neurons themselves. Each artificial neuron knows, or can query, what other artificial neurons it is connected to, and how. This means that the transfer of the mind will be lossless, and it can be done as frequently as desired, without degrading.

The linked article sucks. Here it is straight from the horse's mouth.

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/37095.wss

I don't disagree with your rant, however it is just not a good idea to dismiss a processor bug as "happened a long time ago". The point is, it happened. Processor bugs happen. And here is one that happened last year if you must.

A company which does make stuff, but makes a practice of filing broad patents on every aspect of what they make, however trivial, and then digs them up and uses them to extort payment from others is also engaging in patent trolling. Thus Unisys with the LZW patent, Microsoft with the various FAT long-file-name patents, etc.

But when do you get to use a loaded word like "extort" and when is it merely ordinary, run-of-the-mill patent licensing, which is very clearly part of the purpose of having patent law in the first place? IBM has one of the largest patent portfolios in the world. Is it a "patent troll"? I hardly think so. Wall Street and economists don't appear to think so, either; IBM is considered a blue chip stock.

Take a look at IBM's Many Eyes (21 different visualizations) -- maybe there's one that will fit the bill.

Here are a few examples of visualizations about "Cisco" (I'm not familiar with Cisco's config file and ACLs so I don't know if these are relevant):
CISCO.COM web site IA network diagram (level 2 & 3)
CISCO.COM web site IA treemap

Cisco device types

# of Devices using a version of Cisco's IOS

Take a look at IBM's Many Eyes (21 different visualizations) -- maybe there's one that will fit the bill.

Here are a few examples of visualizations about "Cisco" (I'm not familiar with Cisco's config file and ACLs so I don't know if these are relevant):
CISCO.COM web site IA network diagram (level 2 & 3)
CISCO.COM web site IA treemap

Cisco device types

# of Devices using a version of Cisco's IOS

Take a look at IBM's Many Eyes (21 different visualizations) -- maybe there's one that will fit the bill.

Here are a few examples of visualizations about "Cisco" (I'm not familiar with Cisco's config file and ACLs so I don't know if these are relevant):
CISCO.COM web site IA network diagram (level 2 & 3)
CISCO.COM web site IA treemap

Cisco device types

# of Devices using a version of Cisco's IOS

Take a look at IBM's Many Eyes (21 different visualizations) -- maybe there's one that will fit the bill.

Here are a few examples of visualizations about "Cisco" (I'm not familiar with Cisco's config file and ACLs so I don't know if these are relevant):
CISCO.COM web site IA network diagram (level 2 & 3)
CISCO.COM web site IA treemap

Cisco device types

# of Devices using a version of Cisco's IOS