100 Years Of IBM: 25 Historic Milestones
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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IBM From the Beginning
In its earliest days, it built scales, time-recording devices, and tabulating machines as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, or "CTR" as it was known. Global ambitions led Tom Watson Sr., who led the company from 1914 until 1956, to change the name to International Business Machines in 1924 (the year this picture was taken outside the company's office in Washington, D.C.).
Under Watson and later his son, Tom Watson Jr. (top exec from 1956 to 1971), IBM took on massive projects ranging from implementing the Social Security Act of 1935, to developing Cold-War-era aircraft tracking systems and atomic research labs, to building guidance systems for the early space program. IBM has plenty of inventions to its credit along the way, from electric tabulators and typewriters, to dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) and hard disk drives, to the barcodes and magnetic-stripe cards now ubiquitous in retail transactions.
IBM has also played a significant role in software, contributing to the FORTRAN, COBOL, and SQL programming languages, among others, and introducing the relational database and speech recognition software. Real IT veterans will hark back to the System/360, while younger generations will remember the IBM PCs and AS/400s of the 1980s. IBM dominated computing from the 1960s into the early 1980s, but that success led to anti-trust scrutiny. That distraction plus sprawl led to the near collapse of the company in the early 1990s, but turnaround figure Lou Gerstner resisted calls to break up the company. A resurgence has been led by a move into software and services in recent years, and through it all, IBM has retained a culture that values internal leadership development, investment in R&D, and big thinking.
C-T-R: IBM's Original Three-Letter Acronym
IBM's roots actually predate 1911, but on June 16, 1911, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (C-T-R) was incorporated with the merger of the Tabulating Machine Company (dating from the 1880s), the International Time Recording Company (founded 1900), and the Computing Scale Corporation (founded 1901). C-T-R had 1,300 employees, with the top brass pictured here in the New York headquarters. By 1915, it had $4 million in revenue and nearly 1,700 employees.
IBM Punch Card Sets Standard
The key company behind the formation of IBM was the Tabulating Machine Company, which invented punched-card data processing. C-T-R advanced the technology in 1923 with the first electric key punch, a speed and accuracy advance over mechanical punches. In the late 1920s, IBM introduced an 80-column punch card--think of it as a higher-density storage device. The "IBM Card" became the industry standard.
Punch Cards Follow The Razor Blade Model
Punch cards, sold in stacks of 1,000 cards, were a big money maker for IBM. Cards might store all data related to a particular employee or customer. The Carroll Press of the 1920s, shown here, enabled IBM to cut and print 460 cards per minute, per machine. IBM agreed to give up much of its card-making capacity in 1956 as part of a Consent Decree agreement with the Justice Department (the first of two major anti-trust investigations of the company). By this time, however, Tom Watson Jr., who signed the decree, knew that storage technologies would soon move beyond punch cards.
Scale Business Doesn't Measure Up
IBM's Dayton Scale business, originally Computing Scale Corp., built price-calculating scales for foodservice operations. It was a stepchild that was eventually sold to Hobart Manufacturing in 1933.
Time-Recording Business Doesn't Compute
The recoding division of IBM churned out Daily Dial Attendance Recorders such as this model in the 1930s. Employees turned the dial to their employee number and punched in. The device came in three sizes--50, 100, or 150 employee--and attendance was logged on a single or double printout drum. The time recording business was sold in 1958.
Try Hacking Into This HR Record
An early, un-punched punch card taken from IBM's own human resources department. Human-readable information would be typed in on the left-hand side of the card and machine-readable information punched in the appropriate spots on the right. Data theft back then meant stealing punch cards.
IBM Bows Type 405 Alphabetic Accounting Machine
Introduced in 1934, the electro-mechanical IBM Type 405 Alphabetic Accounting Machine could prepare complete, printed reports compiling both alpha and numeric information from punch cards. Accounting machines were IBM's flagship products from the mid 1930s into the mid 1950s.
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.
IBM Helps U.S. Implement Social Security
The Social Security Act of 1935 presented a huge accounting challenge. This news article from 1937 detailed the Social Security Board's operation in Baltimore. With the help of punch cards and IBM accounting machines, the Board was able to process up to 600,000 benefit calculations a day for the 26 million workers initially covered by Social Security.
Move To Tubes Speeds Processing
The IBM 603 Electronic Multiplier, introduced in 1946, performed addition and multiplication five times faster than its predecessor. As shown here at the back of the machine, the technology evolved from electro-mechanical switches to vacuum-tube-based circuits.
SSEC Delivers Speed, Memory, and Programability
IBM's Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator, introduced in 1948, boasted processing speed, memory, computational capacity, and programmability. The Control Desk seen here was the tip of the iceberg. The rest of the machine surrounded the operator, lining all four walls of a large room. The SSEC is said to be the first computer that could modify a stored program. IBM invited university professors and scientific researchers to use the device at no charge at an IBM facility--a good-will gesture that generally stoked demand for computer purchases.
SAGE Gives U.S. Airforce An Acre of Computing Power
The SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) AN/FSQ-7 was built under contract to MIT's Lincoln Laboratories for the North American Air Defense System starting in 1958. This magnetic core array is one of many in a system that ultimately covered nearly an acre of floor space. The computer was operational from 1962 into the early 1980s.
Speech Recognition Arrives
The IBM Shoebox introduced in 1961 recognized 16 spoken words, plus the numbers zero through nine. The unit was displayed at the IBM pavilion at the 1962 World's Fair in Seattle.
American Airlines Introduces Sabre Reservation System
Two IBM 7090 mainframes initially powered American Airlines' Sabre Reservation System, which was introduced in 1962. The system worked over phone lines in "real time," with links between high-speed computers handling seat inventory and passenger records from terminals in more than 50 cities.
System/360: Watson Jr.'s 'Riskiest Decision'
As Tom Watson Jr. took the reins of IBM in 1956, technologies were in flux, with vacuum tubes giving way to transistors and punch cards giving way to magnetic storage. In 1962, Watson decided to totally revamp the company's product strategy, backing the development of the System/360, ultimately introduced in 1964. Watson said it was the riskiest decision he ever made because the S/360 was incompatible with previous IBM machines, demanding major new investments by customers. IBM sunk some $5 billion into development of a modular family of products that could share the same programming instructions but be flexibly adapted and scaled for many applications. They were the first computers based on Solid Logic technology, a precursor to integrated circuits. Monthly rental rates exceeded $100,000 for a large, multisystem configuration.
IBM Speeds The Space Race
The 59-pound onboard guidance computer seen here guided Gemini space flights. The research required to develop the computer improved silicon wafer circuit fabrication techniques and was followed by IBM involvement in NASA's Apollo and Space Shuttle programs.
Watson's Gamble Pays Off
In 1960, IBM had revenue of $1.8 billion and 104,000 employees. System 360 drove huge growth, with revenue hitting $7.5 billion by 1970 and employee ranks growing to 269,000. The 1970s brought the System 370 update, pictured here, which was compatible with the S/360, but several times faster and more reliable. IBM's success fueled concern at the Department of Justice, which filed a second major anti-trust complaint against IBM in 1969. The case turned into a draining 13-year legal battle that was ultimately dropped by the government in 1982.
IBM's First 'Portable' Weighs A Ton
Altair, Hewlett-Packard, and others beat IBM to the "first personal computer" claims, but IBM's first stab at the footprint was the 5100, which weighed more than 50 pounds and priced from $9,000 to $20,000, depending on memory (16K to 64K) and storage options (like 8-inch floppies).
Making PCs Safe For The Blue-Suit Set
Apple produced the first highly successful, mass-produced personal computer in 1977, but it took the IBM PC, introduced in 1981, to convince many straight-laced, business-minded types that PCs weren't play toys. Ranging from $1,600 to $4,500, IBM's PC line started at 16K and expanded to 256K.
IBM Enters The Apps Game
The Application System/400 (AS/400) product line introduced in 1988 brought easy-to-use computing to small and midsize businesses, with IBM and IBM partners adding more than 1,000 industry-focused software packages.
Gerstner Rides To The Rescue
By 1993, a sprawling IBM was losing money, and for the first time the company reached outside its ranks to hire a new CEO. McKinsey, American Express, and RJR Nabisco veteran Lou Gerstner slashed costs--and in a first at IBM cut tens of thousands of employees--but he also resisted calls to break IBM into separate companies. Over the next decade, IBM divested low-margin businesses, including DRAM, networking, personal printers, and hard drives, but channeled new investment into software and services, buying, most notably, Lotus Software and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Grand Challenges Bring Beneficial Research
"Throughout its history, IBM has taken on "grand challenges" like instituting Social Security and helping the space program get off the ground. In the mid 1990s, there was Deep Blue, the computer that took on and eventually beat chess champion Gary Kasparov, as witnessed in 1998 by these IBM researchers. The project is said to have advanced clustered computing approaches. Next was Blue Gene, a project launched in 1999 to study the folding of proteins--crucial in studying certain diseases. The $100 million initiative advanced massively parallel processing (MPP) with high-speed messaging between nodes and fault tolerance, the ability to cope with failing nodes and components without bringing the entire computer down. These are hallmarks of the MPP environments of today.
The End Of IBM's PC Era
IBM's Thinkpad line of laptop computers introduced in the early 1990s included this innovative 701C "butterfly" model with a full-sized keypad that folded diagonally for compact storage when closed. The strategy of selling low-margin businesses and investing in high-margin businesses continued under Samuel J. Palmisano, who succeeded Gerstner in 2002. IBM's PC business was sold to Lenovo in 2005, and Palmisano has presided over investments of more than $10 billion in software, notably in the areas of information management, business intelligence, and analytics, with acquisitions including FileNet, Cognos, SPSS, iLog, and Netezza. All these assets figure in IBM's current "Smarter Planet" push.
IBM's Latest Triumph: Supporting Deep Q&A
Taking on another grand challenge, IBM spent four years and untold hundreds of millions of dollars developing Watson, a computer that can play Jeopardy. In fact, Watson answers questions so quickly and accurately that it beat the show's all-time champions in two matches aired in February. If IBM's previous (chess-playing) Deep Blue and (genetics-studying) Blue Gene supercomputers are any indication, advances in what IBM calls deep question-and-answer analytics could show up in the real world within three to five years. Check out our "Inside Watson" slideshow for more details.
For More on IBM's History…
Resources for this slideshow included IBM Archivist Paul Lasewicz, Wikipedia's "History of IBM" and Thomas J. Watson Jr./Sr. and Lou Gerstner entries, and "Making the World Work Better," a just-released history of IBM.
For More on IBM's History…
Resources for this slideshow included IBM Archivist Paul Lasewicz, Wikipedia's "History of IBM" and Thomas J. Watson Jr./Sr. and Lou Gerstner entries, and "Making the World Work Better," a just-released history of IBM.
IBM From the Beginning
In its earliest days, it built scales, time-recording devices, and tabulating machines as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, or "CTR" as it was known. Global ambitions led Tom Watson Sr., who led the company from 1914 until 1956, to change the name to International Business Machines in 1924 (the year this picture was taken outside the company's office in Washington, D.C.).
Under Watson and later his son, Tom Watson Jr. (top exec from 1956 to 1971), IBM took on massive projects ranging from implementing the Social Security Act of 1935, to developing Cold-War-era aircraft tracking systems and atomic research labs, to building guidance systems for the early space program. IBM has plenty of inventions to its credit along the way, from electric tabulators and typewriters, to dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) and hard disk drives, to the barcodes and magnetic-stripe cards now ubiquitous in retail transactions.
IBM has also played a significant role in software, contributing to the FORTRAN, COBOL, and SQL programming languages, among others, and introducing the relational database and speech recognition software. Real IT veterans will hark back to the System/360, while younger generations will remember the IBM PCs and AS/400s of the 1980s. IBM dominated computing from the 1960s into the early 1980s, but that success led to anti-trust scrutiny. That distraction plus sprawl led to the near collapse of the company in the early 1990s, but turnaround figure Lou Gerstner resisted calls to break up the company. A resurgence has been led by a move into software and services in recent years, and through it all, IBM has retained a culture that values internal leadership development, investment in R&D, and big thinking.
RECOMMENDED READING:
Inside Watson, IBM's Jeopardy Computer
What's At Stake In IBM's Jeopardy Challenge?
IBM: From Networked Business To Social Media
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