B005HFI0X2 EBOK (48 page)

IBM is so important in the history of modern computer technology that we decide to follow a trail to learn more about the company.

“NOTHING IN THE WORLD WILL EVER STOP IT”: THE RISE OF IBM

In January 1926, Thomas Watson Sr., the founding president of IBM, predicted to the star salesmen at his One Hundred Percent Club convention: “This business has a future for your sons and grandsons and your great-grandsons, because it is going on forever. Nothing in the world will ever stop it. The IBM is not merely an organization of men; it is an institution that will go on forever.”
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To date his prediction has been borne out.

In its centennial year of 2011, IBM ranked eighteenth on
Fortune
’s list of America’s biggest companies and the seventh most profitable, and fifty-second on the list of the Fortune Global 500. IBM was ranked number one in information technology services. In the same year, IBM ranked twelfth out of fifty on a list of the world’s most admired companies, and number one in information technology (IT) services.
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The previous year, the company had filed eighteen thousand patents—more than any company in the world—and spent $24 billion on R&D. Among its projects were Smart Planet, a program to use computer networking to ease traffic and help power grids.

In 1997, an IBM computer, Deep Blue, defeated the chess champion Garry Kasparov at chess. In February 2011, Ken Jennings, the record-holding champion, and another contestant, Brad Rutter, battled Watson on the American television quiz show
Jeopardy
. Watson was a computer capable of understanding questions in natural language and developed by IBM’s DeepQA project, headed by David Ferrucci. Watson defeated its human rivals, to win the prize of $1 million. In his final
Jeopardy
response, Jennings, alluding to a line in an episode of the TV cartoon show
The Simpsons
, wrote: “I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords.” IBM had influenced popular culture before. The company’s name is thought to have inspired the intelligent computer in Stanley Kubrick’s and Arthur C. Clarke’s 1968 science fiction movie
2001: A Space Odyssey
, each letter of whose name is one letter removed from IBM: HAL.

Watson was named after IBM’s founder, Thomas J. Watson Sr. The son of a farmer and lumber dealer in upstate New York, Watson began his career peddling pianos, organs, and sewing machines. He discovered his talents as a salesman as a protégé of John H. Patterson, the dynamic and eccentric president of National Cash Register (NCR). Along with Patterson and other NCR managers, Watson was accused by the government of violating antitrust laws as part of a scheme to dominate the used cash register market. Like Patterson, Watson was cleared, but six months later the temperamental Patterson fired him for disagreeing with him in public.

In 1914, Watson became head of the Computer Tabulating Recording Corporation (CTR), whose name he changed to International Business Machines in 1924. Founded a few years before his arrival, in 1911, CTR was the product of mergers of several other companies. The most important was the Tabulating Machine Company, whose founder, as we saw earlier, was the inventor and former Census Bureau official Herman Hollerith.

Watson was a rare combination of technological visionary, marketing genius, and supersalesman. In the late twentieth century, the stereotypical tech company founder in the popular mind was a brilliant bohemian from the San Francisco Bay area who favored informality and a casual approach to organization. Watson could not have been further from that archetype.

A strict Methodist, Watson insisted that his male employees wear only white shirts and dark suits and avoid embarrassing themselves with alcohol. Influenced by Patterson’s methods, Watson created a revival-like atmosphere to inspire his sales force at meetings and the conventions of his One Hundred Percent Club. Alleged to have influenced Japanese and other East Asian managers, Watson motivated employees with inspirational slogans like the Five C’s—Conception, Consistency, Cooperation, Courage, and Confidence—and hymnlike songs, including this, from his days at CTR:

Mr. Watson is the man we’re working for

He’s the leader of the CTR

He’s the fairest, squarest man we know.
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One of his mottoes was: “IBM products are not bought; they are sold.” His most famous slogan became a fixture in IBM offices and advertisements:

T-H-I-N-K.

In 1929, Watson funded a statistical laboratory at Columbia University, where Wallace J. Eckert worked closely with IBM. At Harvard in 1936, Howard Aiken, a graduate student in physics, proposed the creation of a massive computer, inspired by the work of the nineteenth-century British theorist of computing, Charles Babbage. IBM’s chief engineer, James Bryce, brought the idea to the attention of Watson, who funded the project and assigned engineers to assist Aiken. The result was the five-ton Harvard Mark I, completed in 1943. Furious that Aiken neglected to mention IBM’s support at the press conference, Watson got his revenge by establishing the Watson Computer Laboratory at Columbia in 1945. Led by Wallace Eckert, the Columbia laboratory developed the selective sequence electronic calculator, which overshadowed Harvard’s Mark I when it debuted in 1948. Displayed on the ground floor of IBM’s headquarters in New York City, the computer became a sensation.

FROM SAGE TO SABRE

According to legend, a myopic Watson stated after World War II that there was only a market for a dozen or so computers in the world. In reality, IBM was working on numerous computer projects at the time. When the Korean War began in June 1950, IBM won a government contract to develop a “defense calculator.”

IBM’s most important military contract of the 1950s was the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) program. The ancestry of the SAGE project can be traced to a memo written by Jay Forrester in 1948, outlining a computerized national air-defense system inspired by radar defenses in World War II for North American defenses against Soviet bomber (and later missile) attacks. Forrester had been working since 1944 at MIT on Project Whirlwind, a digital air-combat-information program. When IBM received a contract to work on SAGE, it received the Whirlwind technology. In addition to IBM, contractors on the SAGE project included MIT’s Lincoln Laboratories, Western Electric, the SDC branch of RAND, and the Burroughs Company. The Computer System Division of Lincoln Laboratories in 1958 became the MITRE Corporation, which worked on software and systems integration.

When complete, the SAGE system consisted of twenty-three concrete bunkers in the United States and one in Canada. Each of the direction centers contained an IBM AN/FSQ-7 computer, along with a standby. Each AN/FSQ-7 weighed 250 tons, and contained forty-nine thousand vacuum tubes. The installations were designed for the simultaneous analysis of vast amounts of data coming in from radar on the ground and mounted on ships and planes.

The most ambitious computer project in history to date, the SAGE system was completed in 1963 and remained operational until it was decommissioned in 1983. Although it was technologically obsolete almost as soon as it was finished, the system helped to inspire later innovations. The linkages between the nodes in the SAGE system helped to inspire J. C. Licklider’s musings, which in turn led to the development of ARPANET and the Internet.

For its part, IBM drew on its experience in the SAGE project in the early 1960s when it received a contract from American Airlines to devise a computerized airline reservation system entitled SABRE (Semi-Automatic Business Research Environment—even the name was modeled on SAGE). SABRE became the basis of modern airline reservations.

THE COMPUTER THAT IBM MADE, THAT MADE IBM

But it was in civilian office computing that IBM would make its greatest mark. Earlier in 1947, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly had incorporated the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation to make the UNIVAC and other computers. Their commercial difficulties led the two to visit Watson and his son and eventual successor as head of IBM, Thomas Watson Jr. Perhaps remembering his earlier brush with antitrust law at NCR, the senior Watson had checked with IBM’s lawyers and told the inventors that the Justice Department probably would not allow IBM to absorb their company because of antitrust considerations. Instead, the rights to UNIVAC were sold to James Rand, the president of Remington Rand, making the company a leading computer manufacturer. (In 1955, Remington Rand merged with the Sperry Corporation to become Rand, later Sperry; a merger between Sperry and Burroughs in 1986 produced Unisys.) On live television on election eve 1952, a UNIVAC computer correctly predicted a landslide for Republican presidential candidate Dwight Eisenhower (the computer’s operators thought at first the computer must have been mistaken).

Motivated by competition with Remington Rand, IBM in 1953 brought out its inexpensive model 650, which used magnetic tape instead of punched cards. Thomas Watson Jr. observed that “the 650 became computing’s ‘Model T.’ ”
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In the early 1960s, IBM took on the challenge of providing office computers that used compatible software. In secrecy, the company sponsored one of the greatest corporate research programs in history, code-named the New Product Line. Thousands of programmers and engineers labored urgently in multiple laboratories and IBM began to manufacture more semiconductors than any other company in the world. Finally in April 1964, IBM unveiled its System/360 product line of software-compatible mainframe computers. The System/360 was described as “the computer that IBM made, that made IBM.”

FROM VACUUM TUBE TO SILICON CHIP

Early computers were hobbled by reliance on vacuum tubes that took up space and generated heat. At AT&T’s Bell Laboratories, the physicist William Shockley led a research group that developed solid-state transistors between 1947 and 1950. By the mid-1950s, Texas Instruments led in the manufacture of silicon transistors. The next step, propelled by US military demands for smaller computers, was the combination of transistors on a single circuit board. Working independently of each other, Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor and Gordon Moore at Intel invented the silicon “chip,” a single “integrated circuit” that combined transistors and capacitors. Moore’s law, named after Gordon Moore, was based on the fact that the number of transistors per microchip doubled roughly every seventeen months after 1972, when the Intel 8008 chip had 2,500 transistors, to 2000, when the Pentium 4 processor had forty-two million transistors.

Soon there were three kinds of integrated circuits: memory chips, microprocessors, developed by Intel, and microcapacitors. Raytheon and the optical equipment manufacturer Perkin-Elmer developed a method of photolithography fabrication that made possible the mass production of silicon chips.

SIDE TRAIL: RAYTHEON AND THE RADARANGE

Let us follow a side trail on the imaginary memex to learn more about Raytheon. It brings us to the microwave oven, the first major innovation in cooking since primitive hominids began to cook with fire.

Percy Spencer, an engineer working at Raytheon, was startled one day in 1946 when a candy bar in his pocket melted as he was working on a new vacuum tube called a magnetron. Realizing that the magnetron was the cause, Spencer successfully popped popcorn kernels by placing them nearby and then cooked an egg, which exploded in his face. By spring 1946, Spencer and a colleague, P. R. “Roly” Hanson, were working on a project given the secret code name Speedy Weenie. Their work led to Raytheon’s 1946 patent for the microwave oven. In 1947, a contest among employees to name the device produced a winner: “Radarange.” By 1976, more American households owned a microwave oven than owned a dishwasher.
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At the time that it invented the microwave, Raytheon was a leading manufacturer of vacuum tubes, having acquired or merged with other companies in the field including Acme-Delta and Q.R.S. Company. In 1928, it had chosen the name Raytheon Manufacturing Company to replace its previous name, the American Appliance Company, because of the visibility of one of its products called the Raytheon (“light of the gods”), an electron tube used in a “battery eliminator” that converted the alternating current in household wiring to direct current that could be used in radios, as an alternative to batteries.

The Raytheon electron tube was the invention of Charles G. Smith, who had founded the American Appliance Company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1922, with two partners. One was an engineer named Laurence K. Marshall. The other founder of the company to be known as Raytheon was Marshall’s engineering school classmate and college roommate at Tufts University, the thirty-two-year-old Vannevar Bush.

THE ORIGINS OF SILICON VALLEY

Using a skip trail on the memex, we return to the main trail and Bush. Was there any connection between Bush and Silicon Valley? Under the label “Silicon Valley” we find an interesting side trail.

We learn that Professor Bush’s first graduate student at MIT was named Frederick Terman. After taking a job as a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University, Terman was disappointed by the lack of employment opportunities for graduates of his department in Northern California. With his encouragement, two of his students, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, founded an electronics company named Hewlett-Packard in Packard’s garage. Some myths are true; the garage is now a historical landmark in Palo Alto.

After working during the war at Harvard to develop the technology of radar, Terman resumed his post at Stanford and joined others in an attempt to make that university a center of high technology in collaboration with business and government. The railroad baron Leland Stanford, one of the captains of industry of early industrial America, bequeathed his eight-thousand-acre ranch to the university that bore his son’s name. Terman and his colleagues leased out Stanford’s acreage, now called the Stanford Industrial Park, to select high-technology firms including General Electric and Eastman Kodak. One of Terman’s biggest prizes was William Shockley. Shockley joined the faculty at Stanford and directed the Shockley Laboratory of Beckman Instruments.