Slideshows


100 Years Of IBM: 25 Historic Milestones


June 15, 2011 08:00 AM IBM this week celebrates 100 years of innovation and business optimization. From punch cards to the S/360, from tabulators to teraflops, from CEO Watson to supercomputer Watson, IBM has a unique history. Take a visual tour back through the decades.
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Plug Boards: Precursors To Software

IBM corporate archivist Paul C. Lasewicz holds a plug board, which is the equivalent of software for the Type 405. Companies would have racks full of plug boards, with each board wired to support a particular type of report--payroll, revenue, stock control, and so forth. Punch cards, seen in the input and output trays of the accounting machine, stored the transactional data, such as employee hours, sales, and orders. Accounting machines had no stored memory, so they were still tabulating devices rather than computers.

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Great Lost Software: 16 Gone But Not Forgotten

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