Those looking for a juxtaposition of IBM's past and future needn't look much further than two bits of news out of the company this week. The first comes with IBM's announcement of its new zEnterprise EC12 25 mainframe server -- a class of computer that may be a thing of the past in some places, but which still serves a fairly broad range of companies. In addition to an appearance that lives up to the "mainframe" moniker, this one promises 25 percent more performance per core than its predecessor and 50 percent more capacity. The second bit of
