IBM History – See also History of Computing
See: Mythical Man-Month, Anniversary Edition, The: Essays On Software Engineering 2nd Edition
“A limited hangout or partial hangout is, according to former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Victor Marchetti, “spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.”[1][2] (WP)
“In a March 22, 1973, meeting between president Richard Nixon, John Dean, John Ehrlichman, John Mitchell, and H. R. Haldeman, Ehrlichman incorporated the term into a new and related one, “modified limited hangout“.[3][4]
The phrase was coined in the following exchange:[5]” (WP)
PRESIDENT: You think, you think we want to, want to go this route now? And the — let it hang out, so to speak?
DEAN: Well, it’s, it isn’t really that —
HALDEMAN: It’s a limited hang out.
DEAN: It’s a limited hang out.
EHRLICHMAN: It’s a modified limited hang out.PRESIDENT: Well, it’s only the questions of the thing hanging out publicly or privately.
“Before this exchange, the discussion captures Nixon outlining to Dean the content of a report that Dean would create, laying out a misleading view of the role of the White House staff in events surrounding the Watergate burglary. In Ehrlichman’s words: “And the report says, ‘Nobody was involved,'”. The document would then be shared with the United States Senate Watergate Committee investigating the affair. The report would serve the administration’s goals by protecting the President, providing documentary support for his false statements should information come to light that contradicted his stated position. Further, the group discusses having information on the report leaked by those on the Committee sympathetic to the President, to put exculpatory information into the public sphere.[5]” (WP)
“The phrase has been cited as a summation of the strategy of mixing partial admissions with misinformation and resistance to further investigation, and is used in political commentary to accuse people or groups of following a Nixon-like strategy.[6]” (WP) However, this “strategy” has been used since time immemorial.
“Writing in The Washington Post, Mary McGrory described a statement by Pope John Paul II regarding sexual abuse by priests as a “modified, limited hangout”.[7] (WP)
” (WP)
Return to Timeline of the History of Computers
The Byte
Werner Buchholz (b. 1922), Louis G. Dooley (dates unavailable)
“Designers of the early binary computers faced a fundamental question: how should the computers’ storage be organized? The computers stored information in bits, but computer users didn’t want to write programs that manipulated bits; they wanted to solve math problems, crack codes, and generally work with larger units of information. The memory of decimal computers such as ENIAC and the UNIVAC I was organized in groups of 10 alphanumeric digits, called words. The binary computers also organized their memory into words, but these groups of bits were called bytes.”
| byte | |
|---|---|
| Unit system | units derived from bit |
| Unit of | digital information, data size |
| Symbol | B or (when referring to exactly 8 bits) o |
“It appears that the word byte was coined simultaneously in 1956 by Werner Buchholz at IBM, working on the IBM STRETCH (the world’s first supercomputer), and by Louis G. Dooley and others at MIT Lincoln Lab working on the SAGE air-defense system. In both cases, they used the word byte to describe the inputs and outputs of machine instructions that could operate on less than a full word. The STRETCH had 60-bit words and used 8-bit bytes to represent characters for its input/output system; the SAGE had instructions that could operate on 4-bit bytes.”
“The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer[1][2] and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit of memory in many computer architectures. To disambiguate arbitrarily sized bytes from the common 8-bit definition, network protocol documents such as The Internet Protocol (RFC 791)(1981) refer to an 8-bit byte as an octet.[3]“
“Over the next 20 years, the definition of a byte was somewhat fluid. IBM used 8-bit bytes with its System/360 architecture, and 8-bit groups were the standard for AT&T’s long-distance digital telephone lines. DEC, on the other hand, successfully marketed a series of computers with 18-bit and 36-bit words, including the PDP-7 and the PDP-10, which both utilized 9-bit bytes.”
“This lack of consistency resulted in the early Internet standards avoiding the word byte entirely. Instead, the word octet is used to describe a group of 8 bits sent over a computer network, a usage that survives to this day in Internet standards.”
“Nevertheless, by the 1980s, the acceptance of 8-bit bytes was almost universal—largely a result of the microcomputer revolution, because micros used 8-bit bytes almost exclusively. In part, that’s because 8 bits is an even power of 2, which makes it somewhat easier to design computer hardware with 8-bit bytes than with 9-bit bytes.”
“Today the era of 9-bit bytes is all but forgotten. And what about collections of 4 bits? Today these are called a nibble (sometimes spelled nybble).”
Multiples of bytes:
| 1000 | kB | kilobyte |
| 10002 | MB | megabyte |
| 10003 | GB | gigabyte |
| 10004 | TB | terabyte |
| 10005 | PB | petabyte |
| 10006 | EB | exabyte |
| 10007 | ZB | zettabyte |
| 10008 | YB | yottabyte |
| 1000 | 103 | k | kilo |
| 10002 | 106 | M | mega |
| 10003 | 109 | G | giga |
| 10004 | 1012 | T | tera |
| 10005 | 1015 | P | peta |
| 10006 | 1018 | E | exa |
| 10007 | 1021 | Z | zetta |
| 10008 | 1024 | Y | yotta |
SEE ALSO:
“Today’s computers most frequently use bytes consisting of 8 bits, represented by 1s and 0s.”
Know your History, It repeats itself! See also Timeline of the History of Computers and This Year in History
History in the year of:
Return to History or This Year in History
c. 2500 BC – Sumerian Abacus
c. 700 BC – Scytale
c. 150 BC – Antikythera Mechanism
c. 60 – Programmable Robot
c. 850 – On Deciphering Cryptographic Messages
c. 1470 – Cipher Disk
1613 – First Recorded Use of the Word Computer
1621 – Slide Rule
1703 – Binary Arithmetic
1758 – Human Computers Predict Halley’s Comet
1770 – The “Mechanical Turk”
1792 – Optical Telegraph
1801 – The Jacquard Loom
1822 – The Difference Engine
1833 – Michael Faraday discovered silver sulfide became a better conductor when heated
1836 – Electrical Telegraph
1843 – Ada Lovelace Writes a Computer Program
1843 – Fax Machine Patented
1843 – Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold-Bug”
1849 to early 1900s – Silicon Valley After the Gold Rush
1851 – Thomas Arithmometer
1854 – Boolean Algebra
1864 – First Electromagnetic Spam Message
1870 – Mitsubishi founded
1874 – Baudot Code
1874 – Semiconductor Diode conceived of
1876 – Ericsson Corporation founded in Sweden
1885 – Stanford University
1885 – William Burroughs’ adding machine
1890 – Herman Hollerith Tabulating the US Census
1890 – Toshiba founded in Japan
1891 – Strowger Step-by-Step Switch
1898 – Nippon Electric Limited Partnership – NEC Corporation founded in Japan
1890s to 1930s – Radio Engineering
Early 1900s – Electrical Engineering
1904 – “Diode” or Two-Element Amplifier actually invented
1904 – Three-Element Amplifier or “Triode”
1906 – Vacuum Tube or “Audion”
1907 – Lee DeForest coins the term “radio” to refer to wireless transmission when he formed his DeForest Radio Telephone Company
1909 – Charles Herrold in San Jose started first radio station in USA with regularly scheduled programming, including songs, using an arc transmitter of his own design. Herrold was one of Stanford’s earliest students and founded his own College of Wireless and Engineering in San Jose
1910 – Radio Broadcasting business pioneered by Lee DeForest with broadcast from New York of a live performance by Italian tenor Enrico Caruso
1910 – Hitachi founded in Japan
1912 – Sharp Corporation founded in Japan and takes its name from one of its founder’s first inventions, the Ever-Sharp mechanical pencil
1914 – Floating-Point Numbers
1917 – Vernam Cipher
1918 – Panasonic, then Matsushita Electric, founded in Japan
1920 – Rossum’s Universal Robots
1927 – Fritz Lang’s Metropolis
1927 – First LED
1928 – Electronic Speech Synthesis
1930 – The Enigma Machine
1931 – Differential Analyzer
1935 – Fujitsu founded as Fuji Telecommunications Equipment Manufacturing in Japan. Fujitsu is the second oldest IT company after IBM and before Hewlett-Packard
1936 – Church-Turing Thesis
1939 – Hewlett-Packard founded in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California by Bill Hewlett and David Packard
1939 – Toshiba founded in Japan
1942 – Atanasoff-Berry Computer
1942 – Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics
1942 – Seiko Corporation founded in Japan
1945 – Vannevar Bush‘s “As We May Think”
1945 – EDVAC First Draft Report – The von Neumann architecture
1946 – Trackball
1946 – Williams Tube Random Access Memory
1947 – Actual Bug Found – First “debugging”
1947 – William Shockley’s Silicon Transistor
1948 – The Bit – Binary Digit 0 or 1
1948 – Curta Calculator
1948 – Manchester SSEM
1949 – Whirlwind Computer
1950 – Error-Correcting Codes (ECC)
1951 – Turing Test of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
1951 – Magnetic Tape Used for Computers
1951 – Core Memory
1951 – Microprogramming
1952 – Computer Speech Recognition
1953 – First Transistorized Computer
1955 – Artificial Intelligence (AI) Coined
1955 – Computer Proves Mathematical Theorem
1956 – First Disk Storage Unit
1956 – The Byte
1956 – Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet
1957 – FORTRAN Programming Language
1957 – First Digital Image
1958 – The Bell 101 Modem
1958 – SAGE Computer Operational
1959 – IBM 1401 Computer
1959 – DEC PDP-1
1959 – Quicksort Algorithm
1959 – SABRE Airline Reservation System
1960 – COBOL Programming Language
1960 – Recommended Standard 232 (RS-232)
1961 – ANITA Electronic Calculator
1961 – Unimate – First Mass-Produced Robot
1961 – Time-Sharing – The Original “Cloud Computing“
1961 – Shinshu Seiki Company founded in Japan (now called Seiko Epson Corporation) as a subsidiary of Seiko to supply precision parts for Seiko watches.
1962 – Spacewar! Video Game
1962 – Virtual Memory
1962 – Digital Long Distance Telephone Calls
1963 – Sketchpad Interactive Computer Graphics
1963 – ASCII Character Encoding
1963 – Seiko Corporation in Japan developed world’s first portable quartz timer (Seiko QC-951)
1964 – RAND Tablet Computer
1964 – Teletype Model 33 ASR
1964 – IBM System/360 Mainframe Computer
1964 – BASIC Programming Language
1965 – First Liquid-Crystal Display (LCD)
1965 – Fiber Optics – Optical-Fiber
1965 – DENDRAL Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research Project
1965 – ELIZA – The First “Chatbot” – 1965
1965 – Touchscreen
1966 – Star Trek Premieres
1966 – Dynamic RAM
1966 – Linear predictive coding (LPC) proposed by Fumitada Itakura of Nagoya University and Shuzo Saito of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT).[71]
1967 – Object-Oriented Programming
1967 – First ATM Machine
1967 – Head-Mounted Display
1967 – Programming for Children
1967 – The Mouse
1968 – Carterfone Decision
1968 – Software Engineering
1968 – HAL 9000 Computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey
1968 – First “Spacecraft” “Guided by Computer”
1968 – Cyberspace Coined—and Re-Coined
1968 – Mother of All Demos
1968 – Dot Matrix Printer – Shinshu Seiki (now called Seiko Epson Corporation) launched the world’s first mini-printer, the EP-101 (“EP” for Electronic Printer,) which was soon incorporated into many calculators
1968 – Interface Message Processor (IMP)
1969 – ARPANET / Internet
1969 – Digital Imaging
1969 – Network Working Group Request for Comments (RFC): 1
1969 – Utility Computing – Early “Cloud Computing“
1969 – Perceptrons Book – Dark Ages of Neural Networks Artificial Intelligence (AI)
1969 – UNIX Operating System
1969 – Seiko Epson Corporation in Japan developed world’s first quartz watch timepiece (Seiko Quartz Astron 35SQ)
1970 – Fair Credit Reporting Act
1970 – Relational Databases
1970 – Floppy Disk
1971 – Laser Printer
1971 – NP-Completeness
1971 – @Mail Electronic Mail
1971 – First Microprocessor – General-Purpose CPU – “Computer on a Chip”
1971 – First Wireless Network
1972 – C Programming Language
1972 – Cray Research Supercomputers – High-Performance Computing (HPC)
1972 – Game of Life – Early Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research
1972 – HP-35 Calculator
1972 – Pong Game from Atari – Nolan Bushnell
1973 – First Cell Phone Call
1973 – Danny Cohen first demonstrated a form of packet voice as part of a flight simulator application, which operated across the early ARPANET.[69][70]
1973 – Xerox Alto from Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)
1973 – Sharp Corporation produced the first LCD calculator
1974 – Data Encryption Standard (DES)
1974 – The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) publishes a paper entitled “A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection”.[82]
1974 – Network Voice Protocol (NVP) tested over ARPANET in August 1974, carrying barely audible 16 kpbs CVSD encoded voice.[71]
1974 – The first successful real-time conversation over ARPANET achieved using 2.4 kpbs LPC, between Culler-Harrison Incorporated in Goleta, California, and MIT Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Massachusetts.[71]
1974 – First Personal Computer: The Altair 8800 Invented by MITS in Albuquerque, New Mexico
1975 – Colossal Cave Adventure – Text-based “Video” Game
1975 – The Shockwave Rider SciFi Book – A Prelude of the 21st Century Big Tech Police State
1975 – AI Medical Diagnosis – Artificial Intelligence in Medicine
1975 – BYTE Magazine
1975 – Homebrew Computer Club
1975 – The Mythical Man-Month
1975 – The name Epson was coined for the next generation of printers based on the EP-101 which was released to the public. (EPSON:E-P-SON: SON of Electronic Printer).[7] Epson America Inc. was established to sell printers for Shinshu Seiki Co.
1976 – Public Key Cryptography
1976 – Acer founded
1976 – Tandem NonStop
1976 – Dr. Dobb’s Journal
1977 – RSA Encryption
1977 – Apple II Computer
1977 – Danny Cohen and Jon Postel of the USC Information Sciences Institute, and Vint Cerf of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), agree to separate IP from TCP, and create UDP for carrying real-time traffic.
1978 – First Internet Spam Message
1978 – France’s Minitel Videotext
1979 – Secret Sharing for Encryption
1979 – Dan Bricklin Invents VisiCalc Spreadsheet
1980 – Timex Sinclair ZX80 Computer
1980 – Flash Memory
1980 – RISC Microprocessors – Reduced Instruction Set Computer CPUs
1980 – Commercially Available Ethernet Invented by Robert Metcalfe of 3Com
1980 – Usenet
1981 – IBM Personal Computer – IBM PC
1981 – Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) Email
1981 – Japan’s Fifth Generation Computer Systems – Japan
1982 – Sun Microsystems was founded on February 24, 1982.[2]
1982 – AutoCAD
1982 – First Commercial UNIX Workstation
1982 – PostScript
1982 – Microsoft and the IBM PC Clones
1982 – First CGI Sequence in Feature Film – Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
1982 – National Geographic Moves the Pyramids – Precursor to Photoshop
1982 – Secure Multi-Party Computation
1982 – TRON Movie
1982 – Home Computer Named Machine of the Year by Time Magazine
1983 – The Qubit – Quantum Computers
1983 – WarGames
1983 – 3-D Printing
1983 – Computerization of the Local Telephone Network
1983 – First Laptop
1983 – MIDI Computer Music Interface
1983 – Microsoft Word
1983 – Nintendo Entertainment System – Video Games
1983 – Domain Name System (DNS)
1983 – IPv4 Flag Day – TCP/IP
1984 – Text-to-Speech (TTS)
1984 – Apple Macintosh
1984 – VPL Research, Inc. – Virtual Reality (VR)
1984 – Quantum Cryptography
1984 – Telebit TrailBlazer Modems Break 9600 bps
1984 – Verilog Language
1984 – Dell founded by Michael Dell
1984 – Cisco Systems was founded in December 1984
1985 – Connection Machine – Parallelization
1985 – First Computer-Generated TV Host – Max Headroom – CGI
1985 – Zero-Knowledge Mathematical Proofs
1985 – FCC Approves Unlicensed Wireless Spread Spectrum
1985 – NSFNET National Science Foundation “Internet”
1985 – Desktop Publishing – with Macintosh, Aldus PageMaker, LaserJet, LaserWriter and PostScript
1985 – Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)
1985 – GNU Manifesto from Richard Stallman
1985 – AFIS Stops a Serial Killer – Automated Fingerprint Identification System
1986 – Software Bug Fatalities
1986 – Pixar Animation Studios
1986 – D-Link Corporation founded in Taipei, Taiwan
1987 – Digital Video Editing
1987 – GIF – Graphics Interchange Format
1988 – MPEG – Moving Picture Experts Group – Coding-Compressing Audio-Video
1988 – CD-ROM
1988 – Morris Worm Internet Computer Virus
1988 – Linksys founded
1989 – World Wide Web-HTML-HTTP Invented by Tim Berners-Lee
1989 – Asus was founded in Taipei, Taiwan
1989 – SimCity Video Game
1989 – ISP Provides Internet Access to the Public
1990 – GPS Is Operational – Global Positioning System
1990 – Digital Money is Invented – DigiCash – Precursor to Bitcoin
1991 – Pretty Good Privacy (PGP)
1991 – DARPA’s Report “Computers at Risk: Safe Computing in the Information Age“
1991 – Linux Kernel Operating System Invented by Linus Torvalds
1992 – Boston Dynamics Robotics Company Founded
1992 – JPEG – Joint Photographic Experts Group
1992 – First Mass-Market Web Browser NCSA Mosaic Invented by Marc Andreessen
1992 – Unicode Character Encoding
1993 – Apple Newton
1994 – First Banner Ad – Wired Magazine
1994 – RSA-129 Encryption Cracked
1995 – DVD
1995 – E-Commerce Startups – eBay, Amazon and DoubleClick Launched
1995 – AltaVista Web Search Engine
1995 – Gartner Hype Cycle
1996 – Universal Serial Bus (USB)
1996 – Juniper Networks founded
1997 – IBM Computer Is World Chess Champion
1997 – PalmPilot
1997 – E Ink
1998 – Diamond Rio MP3 Player
1998 – Google
1999 – Collaborative Software Development
1999 – Blog Is Coined
1999 – Napster P2P Music and File Sharing
2000 – USB Flash Drive
2000 – Sharp Corporation’s Mobile Communications Division created the world’s first commercial camera phone, the J-SH04, in Japan
2000 – Fortinet founded
2001 – Wikipedia
2001 – Apple iTunes
2001 – Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)
2001 – Quantum Computer Factors “15”
2002 – Home-Cleaning Robot
2003 – CAPTCHA
2004 – Product Tracking
2004 – Facebook
2004 – First International Meeting on Synthetic Biology
2005 – Video Game Enables Research into Real-World Pandemics
2006 – Apache Hadoop Makes Big Data Possible
2006 – Differential Privacy
2007 – Apple iPhone
2008 – Bitcoin
2010 – Air Force Builds Supercomputer with Gaming Consoles
2010 – Cyber Weapons
2011 – Smart Homes via the Internet of Things (IoT)
2011 – IBM Watson Wins Jeopardy!
2011 – World IPv6 Day
2011 – Social Media Enables the Arab Spring
2012 – DNA Data Storage
2013 – Algorithm Influences Prison Sentence
2013 – Subscription Software “Popularized”
2014 – Data Breaches
2014 – Over-the-Air Vehicle Software Updates
2015 – Google Releases TensorFlow
2016 – Augmented Reality Goes Mainstream
2016 – Computer Beats Master at Game of Go
~2050 -Hahahaha! – Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)
~9999 – The Limits of Computation?
Red Hat, Inc. is an American multinational software company that provides open source software products to enterprises. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide. It became a subsidiary of IBM on July 9, 2019.[8]
Red Hat has become associated to a large extent with its enterprise operating system Red Hat Enterprise Linux. With the acquisition of open-source enterprise middleware vendor JBoss, Red Hat also offers Red Hat Virtualization (RHV), an enterprise virtualization product. Red Hat provides storage, operating system platforms, middleware, applications, management products, and support, training, and consulting services.
Red Hat creates, maintains, and contributes to many free software projects. It has acquired several proprietary software product codebases through corporate mergers and acquisitions and has released such software under open source licenses. As of March 2016, Red Hat is the second largest corporate contributor to the Linux kernel version 4.14 after Intel.[9]
On October 28, 2018, IBM announced its intent to acquire Red Hat for $34 billion.[10][11][12] The acquisition closed on July 9, 2019.[13]
Return to Timeline of the History of Computers or History
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Kahn, Robert E. “The Role of Government in the Evolution of the Internet.” Communications of the ACM, August 1994.
Kahn, Robert E., Steven A. Gronemeyer, Jerry Burchfiel, and Ronald C. Kunzelman. “Advances in Packet Radio Technology.” Proceedings of the IEEE, November 1978.
Kantrowitz, Barbara, and Adam Rogers. “The Birth of the Internet.” Newsweek, 8 August 1994.
Kleinrock, Leonard. “Principles and Lessons in Packet Communications.” Proceedings of the IEEE, November 1978.
Landweber, Lawrence H., Dennis M. Jennings, and Ira Fuchs. “Research Computer Networks and Their Interconnection.” IEEE Communications Magazine, June 1986.
Lee, J. A. N., and Robert F. Rosin.“The CTSS Interviews.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 14, no. 1, 1992.
———.“The Project MAC Interviews.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 14, no. 2, 1992.
Licklider, J. C. R. “A Gridless, Wireless Rat-Shocker.” Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology 44, 1951.
———. “Man-Computer Symbiosis.” Reprint. In Memoriam: J. C. R. Licklider. Digital Equipment Corporation Systems Research Center, 7 August 1990.
Licklider, J. C. R., and Albert Vezza. “Applications of Information Networks.” Proceedings of the IEEE, November 1978.
Licklider, J. C. R., and Robert W. Taylor. “The Computer as a Communication Device.” Reprint. In Memoriam: J. C. R. Licklider. Digital Equipment Corporation Systems Research Center, 7 August 1990.
Markoff, John. “Up from the Computer Underground.” The NewYork Times, 27 August 1993.
McKenzie, Alexander A., and B. P. Cosell, J. M. McQuillan, M. J. Thrope. “The Network Control Center for the ARPA Network.” Proceedings of the IEEE, 1972.
Mier, Edwin E. “Defense Department Readying Network Ramparts.” Data Communications, October 1983.
Mills, Jeffrey. “Electronic Mail.” Associated Press, 4 January 1976.
———.“Electronic Mail.” Associated Press, 19 June 1976.
———. “Postal Service Tests Electronic Message Service.” Associated Press, 28 March 1978.
Mills, Kay.“The Public Concern: Mail.” Newhouse News Service, 27 July 1976.
Mohl, Bruce A. “2 Bolt, Beranek Officials Collapse in Federal Court.” The Boston Globe, 31 October 1980.
Pallesen, Gayle. “Consultant Firm on PBIA Faces Criminal Charges.” Palm Beach (Florida) Post, 8 November 1980.
Pearse, Ben. “Defense Chief in the Sputnik Age.” The NewYork Times Magazine, 10 November 1957.
Pool, Bob. “Inventing the Future: UCLA Scientist Who Helped Create Internet Isn’t Done Yet.” Los Angeles Times, 11 August 1994.
Quarterman, John S., and Josiah C. Hoskins. “Notable Computer Networks.” Communications of the ACM, October 1986.
Roberts, Lawrence G. “ARPA Network Implications.” Educom, Bulletin of the Interuniversity Communications Council, fall 1971.
Salus, Peter. “Pioneers of the Internet.” Internet World, September 1994.
“Scanning the Issues,” IEEE Spectrum, August 1964.
Schonberg, Harold C. “4 Acoustics Experts to Urge Revisions in Auditorium.” The NewYork Times, 4 April 1963.
———.“Acoustics Again: Philharmonic Hall Has Some Defects, But Also Has a Poetry of Its Own.” The NewYork Times, 9 December 1962.
Selling It. Consumer Reports, June 1977.
Space Agencies. “ARPA Shapes Military Space Research.” Aviation Week, 16 June 1958.
Sterling, Bruce. “Internet.” Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1993.
Swartzlander, Earl. “Time-Sharing at MIT.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 14, no. 1, 1992.
“Transforming BB&N: ARPANET’s Architect Targets Non-Military Networks.” Data Communications, April 1984.
Wilson, David McKay. “BBN Executives Collapse in Court.” Cambridge (Mass.) Chronicle, 6 November 1980.
———. “Consulting Co. Admits Overcharge.” Cambridge (Mass.) Chronicle, 30 October 1980.
Zitner, Aaron. “A Quiet Leap Forward in Cyberspace.” The Boston Globe, 11 September 1994.
Zuckerman, Laurence.“BBN Steps Out of the Shadows and into the Limelight.” The NewYork Times, 17 July 1995.Edit
”Act One.” Symposium on the history of the ARPANET held at the University of California at Los Angeles, 17 August 1989. Transcript.
ARPA Network Information Center, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, Calif. “Scenarios for Using the ARPANET.” Booklet. Prepared for the International Conference on Computer Communication, Washington, D.C., October 1972.
Baran, Paul. Interview by Judy O’Neill. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 5 March 1990.
Barlow, John Perry. “Crime and Puzzlement.” Pinedale, Wyo., June 1990.
BBN Systems and Technologies Corporation. “Annual Report of the Science Development Program.” Cambridge, Mass., 1988.
Bhushan, A. K. “Comments on the File Transfer Protocol.” Request for Comments 385. Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, Calif., August 1972.
———.“The File Transfer Protocol.” Request for Comments 354. Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, Calif., July 1972.
Bhushan, Abhay, Ken Pogran, Ray Tomlinson, and Jim White. “Standardizing Network Mail Headers.” Request for Comments 561. MIT, Cambridge, Mass., 5 September 1973.
Blue, Allan. Interview by William Aspray. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 12 June 1989.
Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. “ARPANET Completion Report: Draft.” Cambridge, Mass., September 1977.
———.“BBN Proposal No. IMP P69-IST-5: Interface Message Processors for the ARPA Computer Network.” Design proposal. Submitted to the Department of the Army, Defense Supply Service, in response to RFQ No. DAHC15 69 Q 0002. Washington, D.C., 6 September 1968.
———. “BBN Report No. 1763: Initial Design for Interface Message Processors for the ARPA Computer Network.” Design proposal. Submitted to the Advanced Research Projects Agency under contract no. DAHC 15-69-C-0179. Washington, D.C., 6 January 1969.
———. “BBN Report No. 1822: Interface Message Processor.” Technical report. Cambridge, Mass., 1969.
———.“Interface Message Processors for the ARPA Computer Network.” Quarterly technical reports. Submitted to the Advanced Research Projects Agency under contract no. DAHC 15-69-C-0179 and contract no. F08606-73-C-0027. Washington, D.C., 1969–1973.
———. “Operating Manual for Interface Message Processors: 516 IMP, 316 IMP, TEP.” Revised. Submitted to the Advanced Research Projects Agency under ARPA order no. 1260, contract no. DAHC15-69-C-0179. Arlington,Va., April 1973.
———. “Report No. 4799: A History of the ARPANET: The First Decade.” Submitted to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Arlington,Va., April 1981.
———.“The Four Cities Plan.” Draft proposal and cost analysis for maintenance of IMPs and TIPs in Boston, Washington, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Papers of BBN Division 6. Cambridge, Mass., April 1974.
———. Internal memoranda and papers relating to the work of Division 6. Cambridge, Mass., 1971–1972.
Carr, C. Stephen, Stephen D. Crocker, and Vinton G. Cerf. “HOST-HOST Communication Protocol in the ARPA Network.” Paper presented at the Spring Joint Computer Conference of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies, 1970.
Catton, Major General, USAF, Jack. Letter to F. R. Collbohm of RAND Corporation, 11 October 1965. Referring the preliminary technical development plan for message-block network to the Defense Communications Agency.
Cerf,Vinton G.“Confessions of a Hearing-Impaired Engineer.” Unpublished.
———.“PARRY Encounters the Doctor.” Request for Comments 439 (NIC 13771). Network Working Group, 21 January 1973.
Cerf, Vinton G., and Jonathan B. Postel. “Specification of Internetwork Transmission Control Protocol: TCP Version 3.” Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, January 1978.
Cerf, Vinton G. Interview by Judy O’Neill. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/ IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 24 April 1990.
Cerf, Vinton G., and Robert Kahn. “HOST and PROCESS Level Protocols for Internetwork Communication.” Notes of the International Network Working Group 39, 13 September 1973.
Clark, Wesley. Interview by Judy O’Neill. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 3 May 1990.
Crocker, David H. “Standard for the Format of ARPA Internet Text Messages.” Request for Comments 822. Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Delaware, 13 August 1982.
Crocker, David H., John J. Vittal, Kenneth T. Pogran, and D. Austin Henderson Jr. “Standard for the Format of ARPA Network Text Messages.” Request for Comments 733. The RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, Calif., 21 November 1977.
Crowther, William. Interview by Judy O’Neill. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 12 March 1990.
Crowther, William, and David Walden. “CurrentViews of Timing.” Memorandum to Frank E. Heart, Cambridge, Mass., 8 July 1969.
Davies, Donald W. “Further Speculations on Data Transmission.” Private papers. London, 16 November 1965.
———.“Proposal for a Digital Communication Network.” Private papers, photocopied and widely circulated. London, June 1966.
———. “Proposal for the Development of a National Communications Service for On-Line Data Processing.” Private papers. London, 15 December 1965.
———. “Remote On-line Data Processing and Its Communication Needs.” Private papers. London, 10 November 1965.
Davies, Donald W. Interview by Martin Campbell-Kelly. National Physical Laboratory, U.K., 17 March 1986.
Davies, Donald W., Keith Bartlett, Roger Scantlebury, and Peter Wilkinson. “A Digital Communications Network for Computers Giving Rapid Response at Remote Terminals.” Paper presented at the Association for Computing Machinery Symposium on Operating System Principles, Gatlinburg, Tenn., October 1967.
Davis, Ruth M. “Comments and Recommendations Concerning the ARPA Network.” Center for Computer Sciences and Technology, U.S. National Bureau of Standards, 6 October 1971.
Digital Equipment Corporation. “Interface Message Processors for the ARPA Computer Network.” Design proposal. Submitted to the Department of the Army, Defense Supply Service, in RFQ no. DAHC15 69 Q 002, 5 September 1968.
Frank, Howard. Interview by Judy O’Neill. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 30 March 1990.
Goldstein, Paul. “The Proposed ARPANET Divestiture: Legal Questions and Economic Issues.” Working Paper, Cabledata Associates, Inc., CAWP no. 101, 27 July 1973.
Hauben, Michael, and Ronda Hauben. The Netizens Netbook page can be found at http://www.columbia.edu/∼hauben/netbook/. The Haubens’ work has also appeared in the Amateur Computerist Newsletter, available from ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/doc/misc/acn/.
Heart, F. E., R. E. Kahn, S. M. Ornstein, W. R. Crowther, and D. C. Walden. “The Interface Message Processor for the ARPA Computer Network.” Paper presented at the Spring Joint Computer Conference of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies, 1970.
Heart, Frank E. Interview by Judy O’Neill. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 13 March 1990.
Herzfeld, Charles. Interview by Arthur Norberg. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 6 August 1990.
Honeywell, Inc. “Honeywell at Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc.” Brochure. Published for the ARPA Network demonstration at the International Conference on Computer Communication, Washington, D.C., October 1972.
Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California. “DOD Standard Transmission Control Protocol.” Request for Comments 761. Prepared for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Information Processing Techniques Office, Arlington,Va., January 1980.
International Data Corporation. “ARPA Computer Network Provides Communications Technology for Computer/Computer Interaction Within Special Research Community.” Industry report and market review. Newtonville, Mass., 3 March 1972.
Kahn, Robert. Interview by Judy O’Neill. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 24 April 1990.
Kahn, Robert. Interview by William Aspray. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 22 March 1989.
Kleinrock, Leonard. Interview by Judy O’Neill. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 3 April 1990.
Kryter, Karl D. “Lick as a Psychoacoustician and Physioacoustician.” Presentation honoring J. C. R. Licklider at the Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Baltimore, Md., 30 April 1991.
———. Obituary of J. C. R. Licklider, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, December 1990.
Licklider, J. C. R., and Welden E. Clark. “On-Line Man-Computer Communication.” Paper presented at the Spring Joint Computer Conference of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies, 1962.
Licklider, J. C. R. Interview by William Aspray. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 28 October 1988.
Lukasik, Stephen. Interview by Judy O’Neill. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 17 October 1991.
Marill, Thomas, and Lawrence G. Roberts. “Toward a Cooperative Network of Time-Shared Computers.” Paper presented at the Fall Joint Computer Conference of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies, 1966.
McCarthy, J., S. Boilen, E. Fredkin, and J. C. R. Licklider. “A Time-Sharing Debugging System for a Small Computer.” Paper presented at the Spring Joint Computer Conference of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies, 1963.
McKenzie, Alexander A. “The ARPA Network Control Center.” Paper presented at the Fourth Data Communications Symposium of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers, October 1975.
McKenzie, Alexander A. Interview by Judy O’Neill. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 13 March 1990.
Message Group. The full text of more than 2,600 e-mail messages sent by members of the Message Group (or MsgGroup), one of the first electronic mailing lists, relating to the development of e-mail. The Computer Museum, Boston, Mass., June 1975–June 1986. Electronic document. (http://www.tcm.org/msgroup)
Metcalfe, Robert. “Some Historic Moments in Networking.” Request for Comments 89. Network Working Group, 19 January 1971.
Myer, T. H., and D. A. Henderson. “Message Transmission Protocol.” Request for Comments 680. Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, Calif., 1975.
National Research Council, Commission on Engineering and Technical Systems. “Transport Protocols for Department of Defense Data Networks.” Report to the Department of Defense and the National Bureau of Standards, Board on Telecommunication and Computer Applications, 1985.
Neigus, N.J. “File Transfer Protocol.” Request for Comments 542. Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., Cambridge, Mass., 12 July 1973.
Norberg, Arthur L., and Judy E. O’Neill. “A History of the Information Processing Techniques Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.” Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minn., 1992.
Ornstein, Severo M., F. E. Heart, W. R. Crowther, H. K. Rising, S. B. Russell, and A. Michel. “The Terminal IMP for the ARPA Network.” Paper presented at the Spring Joint Computer Conference of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies, Atlantic City, N.J., May 1972.
Ornstein, Severo. Interview by Judy O’Neill. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 6 March 1990.
Pogran, Ken, John Vittal, Dave Crowther, and Austin Henderson. “Proposed Official Standard for the Format of ARPA Network Messages.” Request for Comments 724. MIT, Cambridge, Mass., 12 May 1977.
Postel, Jonathan B. “Simple Mail Transfer Protocol.” Request for Comments 821. Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, August 1982.
———. “Specification of Internetwork Transmission Control Protocol: TCP Version 4.” Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, September 1978.
———. “TCP and IP Bake Off.” Request for Comments 1025. Network Working Group, September 1987.
Pouzin, Louis. “Network Protocols.” Notes of the International Network Working Group 50, September 1973.
———.“Presentation and Major Design Aspects of the Cyclades Computer Network.” Paper presented at the IEEE Third Data Communications Symposium (Data Networks: Analysis and Design), November 1973.
———. “Experimental Communication Protocol: Basic Message Frame.” Notes of the International Network Working Group 48, January 1974.
———.“Interconnection of Packet Switching Networks.” Notes of the International Network Working Group 42, October 1973.
———. “Network Architecture and Components.” Notes of the International Network Working Group 49, August 1973.
RAND Corporation. “Development of the Distributed Adaptive Message-Block Network.” Recommendation to the Air Staff, 30 August 1965.
RCA Service Company, Government Services Division. “ARPANET Study Final Report.” Submitted under contract no. F08606-73-C-0018. 24 November 1972.
Richard J. Barber Associates, Inc. “The Advanced Research Projects Agency: 1958–1974.” A study for the Advanced Research Projects Agency under contract no. MDA-903-74-C-0096. Washington, D.C., December 1975. Photocopy.
Roberts, Lawrence G. “Extensions of Packet Communications Technology to a Hand-Held Personal Terminal.” Paper presented at the Spring Joint Computer Conference of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies, May 1972.
———. “Multiple Computer Networks and Intercomputer Communication.” Paper presented at the Association for Computing Machinery Symposium on Operating System Principles, October 1967.
Roberts, Lawrence G., and Barry D. Wessler. “Computer Network Development to Achieve Resource Sharing.” Paper presented at the Spring Joint Computer Conference of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies, 1970.
Roberts, Lawrence G. Interview by Arthur Norberg. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 4 April 1989.
Ruina, Jack. Interview by William Aspray. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 20 April 1989.
Sutherland, Ivan. Interview by William Aspray. Charles Babbage Institute DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 1 May 1989.
Taylor, Robert. Interview by William Aspray. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 28 February 1989.
U.S. Postal Service. “Electronic Message Systems for the U.S. Postal Service.” Report of the U.S.P.S. Support Panel, Committee on Telecommunications, Washington, D.C., January 1977.
Walden, David C. “Experiences in Building, Operating, and Using the ARPA Network.” Paper presented at the Second USA-Japan Computer Conference, Tokyo, Japan, August 1975.
Walden, David. Interview by Judy O’Neill. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 6 February 1990.
Walker, Stephen T. “Completion Report: ARPA Network Development.” Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Information Processing Techniques Office, Washington, D.C., 4 January 1978.
Weik, Martin H. “A Third Survey of Domestic Electronic Digital Computing Systems.” Ballistic Research Laboratories, report no. 1115, March 1961.
White, Jim. “Proposed Mail Protocol.” Request for Comments 524. Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, Calif., 13 June 1973.
Zimmermann, H., and M. Elie. “Proposed Standard Host-Host Protocol for Heterogeneous Computer Networks: Transport Protocol.” Notes of the International Network Working Group 43, December 1973.Edit
Charles Babbage Institute, Center for the History of Information Processing, University of Minnesota. Large archival collection relating to the history of computing. More information can be obtained via the CBI Web site at http://cbi.itdean.umn.edu/cbi/welcome.html or via e-mail addressed to [email protected].
Computer Museum, Boston, Massachusetts. Large collection relating to the history of computing, including the archives of the Message Group concerning the early development of e-mail. The archive is available via the homepage at http://www.tcm.org/msgroup.
Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California. Collection includes up-to-date indexes and tests of Internet standards, protocols, Requests for Comments (RFCs), and various other technical notes available via the ISI Web site: http://www.isi.edu. Some of the earlier RFCs are not available electronically, but are archived off-line in meticulous fashion by RFC editor Jon Postel. A searchable archive is maintained at http://info.internet.isi.edu:80/in-notes/rfc.
Ohio State University, Department of Computer and Information Science. The CIS Web Server offers access to RFCs and various other technical and historical documents related to the Internet via http://www.cis. ohio-state.edu:80/hypertext/information/rfc.html.
Primary Fair Use Source: B000FC0WP6
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Where Wizards Stay Up Late – The Origins Of The Internet by Matthew Lyon and Katie Hafner
by Matthew Lyon and Katie Hafner
“Twenty five years ago, it didn’t exist. Today, twenty million people worldwide are surfing the Net. Where Wizards Stay Up Late is the exciting story of the pioneers responsible for creating the most talked about, most influential, and most far-reaching communications breakthrough since the invention of the telephone.”
“In the 1960’s, when computers where regarded as mere giant calculators, J.C.R. Licklider at MIT saw them as the ultimate communications devices. With Defense Department funds, he and a band of visionary computer whizzes began work on a nationwide, interlocking network of computers. Taking readers behind the scenes, Where Wizards Stay Up Late captures the hard work, genius, and happy accidents of their daring, stunningly successful venture.”Edit
To the memory of J. C. R. Licklider and to the memory of Cary Lu
“Los Alamos’ lights where wizards stay up late, (Stay in the car, forget the gate), To save the world or end it, time will tell” — James Merrill, “Under Libra: Weights and Measures”
Return to Timeline of the History of Computers
A network interface controller (NIC, also known as a network interface card, network adapter, LAN adapter or physical network interface,[3] and by similar terms) is a computer hardware component that connects a computer to a computer network.[4]
Early network interface controllers were commonly implemented on expansion cards that plugged into a computer bus. The low cost and ubiquity of the Ethernet standard means that most newer computers have a network interface built into the motherboard.
Modern network interface controllers offer advanced features such as interrupt and DMA interfaces to the host processors, support for multiple receive and transmit queues, partitioning into multiple logical interfaces, and on-controller network traffic processing such as the TCP offload engine
Return to Timeline of the History of Computers, This Year in History or History
“Nobody ever lost their job for recommending the purchase of IBM products.” —COMPUTER INDUSTRY FOLK WISDOM
“More than any other company since World War II, IBM has shaped the way the modern world goes about its business. Large corporations and governments began to use IBM’s products before 1900. Its computers served as global computing gearboxes for decades before the public “discovered” the Internet in the 1990s. Many of IBM’s computers had been part of the Internet since the early 1970s and part of even older networks since the 1960s. The US census of 1890 was the first in the world to be done using automation tools — the punch card — and that too came from what would come to be IBM. For a long time, the company has been at the center of much of what makes a modern society function.” Fair Use Source: B08BSXJCBP
“By working in conference rooms and data centers for over a century, IBM made this achievement possible. For that reason, few people outside those two places knew what it did, or how. They just knew that it was big, important, and usually well run. What they understood was largely the product of a century-long marketing and public relations campaign by IBM to manage carefully what we imagine when thinking about the firm. Its influence proved so powerful for so long that whenever there were problems at IBM — and there always seemed to be — the information technology world was affected, including the operation of large enterprises and government agencies, stock markets, and even how national governments armed themselves for global wars.” (B08BSXJCBP)
“So what? We live in an increasingly dangerous world, profoundly influenced by computing, so understanding the role of one of the world’s most important providers of such technologies is crucial and urgent. We face three problems: ongoing acts of terrorism; a cyberwar involving the United States, Russia, and China but also affecting other countries caught in the crossfire, evidenced by cyber attacks on German elections, Chinese hacking of companies, and” hoax of “Russian influence on the U.S. presidential election in 2016, for example; and a global political and economic environment that is becoming increasingly uncertain as nations flirt with trade restrictions and efforts to keep jobs from migrating to other countries.” (B08BSXJCBP)
IBM has been at the heart of outsourcing most of its American and European jobs to low cost “slave wages” of Communist China and India.
“In the thick of all these conditions, information processing plays a profound role, and in the middle of that role stands a few technology companies, notably IBM. Which would be more important for the security of a nation under a cyberattack, IBM or Netflix, IBM or Apple? For decades, commercial enterprises and government agencies in the United States and in other nations considered IBM a national treasure.” (B08BSXJCBP)
This is no longer true that IBM is a so-called “national treasure” since IBM with the help of the UniParty of Democrats and Republicans outsourced the vast majority of their American jobs to “slave wage” countries like India and Communist China.
“When the West needed computing for national defense, it turned to IBM. In World War II, IBM provided the Allies with machines to organize national economies for the war effort; in the Cold War, it implemented a national air defense system, assisted in making “space travel” possible, and did intelligence work. IBM has nearly a century of experience dealing with Russian counterintelligence operations—today’s hacking and intelligence operations are not new to it.” (B08BSXJCBP)
IBM like the rest of Big Tech (Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook), at best ignores and is indirectly and sometimes directly complicit with the military hacking and intelligence operations of Communist China and their ChiCom state-sponsored companies. This is due to Big Tech’s close embedded work with the Chinese Communist government and its “companies”.
“We again face a time when many countries need the skills long evident at IBM. Nevertheless, it is a company that has suffered chronic problems, a malaise that while it tries to shake it off leaves open questions about its long-term viability. Understanding what this company is capable of doing begins by appreciating its history. Such insight helps employees, citizens, companies, and entire industries and nations understand what they can do to ensure that IBM is there when they need it. The company is too important to do otherwise. That is what led me to write this book.” (B08BSXJCBP)
“IBM is a company that has a century-long history of not being generous in explaining how it interacts with the world. Like most large multinational corporations, it works to control what the public knows about it, including its global practices. Why, for example, several years ago, was IBM willing to share with China the guts of some of its critical software in exchange for being allowed to sell in that country?” (B08BSXJCBP)
Big Tech, especially Google and IBM, is completely in bed with the Chinese Communist Party and their apparatchiks and nomenklatura.
“Why does it have a history of also doing confidential work for the U.S. intelligence and military communities? During World War II, when it was a ‘tiny company’, the Allies and the Axis” (IBM helped the National Socialists or Nazis) “used its products. Is IBM as American a company as it was 30 or 50 years ago? With an estimated 75 percent of its workforce now located outside the United States, some tough questions have to be asked. Such national security interests are addressed in this book and head-on in the last chapter, because this company may be one of those too critical to allow to fail.” (B08BSXJCBP)
To Big to Fail: Too critical to the Chinese Communists and India?
“Business historians, economists, and business management professors have their own concerns as well. Scholars and journalists have studied IBM for decades. Historians are interested in how large corporations function, why they exist for decades, their effects on national economies, and how they influence their own industries. A crucial question raised by IBM’s experience is how it became an iconic company yet also experienced periods of severe business crises that nearly killed it. Across all of IBM’s history, nearly lethal troubles accompanied its successes. How could that be? What lessons for other firms can IBM’s story teach? What can be learned that scholars and managers can apply in their explorations of how other firms flourished, failed, or are floundering? Answering such questions is central to this book.” (B08BSXJCBP)
“IBM’s influence on our lives is significant, but the company remains little appreciated. Occasionally we hear about it, such as when its stock goes up or down, in the 1980s when it introduced the world to the term “Personal Computer” and in the process made it now “O.K.” for corporations, not just geeks and commercial artists, to use PCs. Did you know that selling computers is now the tiniest piece of IBM’s business?” (B08BSXJCBP)
Especially after IBM sold its PC business to the Chinese Communist Beijing-based Lenovo.
“Did you know that it is the world’s largest software firm, or that it operates in 178 countries? Did you know that it almost went out of business several times, including as recently as 1993? Or that as this book was being written in 2017, observers thought IBM was on a slow march to extinction while still generating billions of dollars in profits each year? It is time to pull aside the veil to see how this fascinating and powerful company was able to thrive for over a century while being both respected and disliked, and to understand what essentially has been its positive impact on the world while at the same time it demonstrated toughness against its enemies and in its constant battle to survive and thrive.” (B08BSXJCBP)
“Today IBM functions under ugly storm clouds, but let a blogger friendly to it describe what I mean: “International Business Machines might be the most iconic company in the entire multitrillion-dollar tech industry. For decades, its name was synonymous with technology, to the point where ‘IBM’ was all but shorthand for computing hardware. Its century-plus history might even make it the oldest tech company in a world where tech titans rise and fall every few years. It’s also one of the world’s largest tech companies, trailing only a handful of others in the global market-cap rankings.” Here is the clincher: “But it’s probably bound to be the worst-performing tech stock on the Dow Jones Industrial Average for the foreseeable future. High performance isn’t a requirement to remain in the Dow, but if IBM can’t do something about its flatlining revenue, it might eventually force the Dow’s handlers to do the unthinkable and replace it with a more appropriate company.”1 What is going on?” (B08BSXJCBP)
“One of the important, little understood findings presented in this book is the profound influence of prior events on what the company does today. Some of its long-serving senior executives are aware, for example, that our grandparents received Social Security payments because of IBM, since nobody else at the time could calculate and print checks quickly enough, or in the millions needed, permanently assisting millions of older Americans out of poverty. Many are aware that IBM could radically define and then build computers that do what one expected of them, thanks to a “bet your company” life-threatening decision in the 1960s that led the majority of the world’s large organizations to finally start using computers. IBM employees wrote software and managed its implementation so that humans could “go to the moon” for the first time and be brought safely back to earth. They are aware that it was IBM’s introduction of the PC in 1981, not Apple’s introduction of the Macintosh, that led the world to finally embrace this technology by the hundreds of millions. It is a company taking the half-century promise of artificial intelligence and turning it into actions that smartly do things humans cannot do, such as advise a doctor based on all human knowledge of a medical condition or calculate more precise weather forecasts. This is happening now, and IBM is making millions of dollars providing such capabilities. We do not know whether IBM is going to be around in 20 or 100 years, but we do know that it is a large, technologically muscular company in the thick of what is going on with computing. Generations of managers, economists, and professionals, and tens of millions of customers, knew about the role of this company during the twentieth century. Now the rest of us should, too.” (B08BSXJCBP)
“What made IBM iconic included technological prowess, enormous business success, massive visibility, and hundreds of thousands of aggressive, smart, ambitious men and women used to success and always fearful of failure. It was the “IBM Way.” For over a half century, it was said no worker ever lost their job for recommending that their firm acquire IBM’s products, because those products normally worked. IBMers would make them work, and “everyone” seemed to think IBM was one of the best-run firms in the world. They joked about IBMers as too serious, focused, polished in their presentations, and facile in dealing with all manner of technology. Competitors feared and hated them; customers accepted them as the safe bet.” (B08BSXJCBP)
“IBM’s iconic role thus left IBMers, their customers, and the public in dozens of countries ill prepared for its near-death experience in the early 1990s. A fired CEO, John F. Akers, almost went into hiding; he never spoke publicly of IBM for the rest of his life. His successor, Louis V. Gerstner Jr., observed the IBM culture as a customer and now had to face a depressed yet combative workforce. He had worked at Nabisco as a turnaround leader and came into IBM as the butt of cookie jokes but with the hope that he could save the firm. He brought the company back to iconic status. Afterward he reported that the biggest problem he faced was IBM’s culture, invented by Thomas Watson Sr. and his son Thomas Watson Jr., remade partly by Charlie Chaplin’s character the “Little Tramp,” and battered by hundreds of competitors, including Steve Jobs at Apple. To any IBM employee, the company always felt small, because it was a firm filled with characters, more a collection of fantastic personalities than a faceless corporation, an ecosystem with its own culture.” (B08BSXJCBP)
“IBM’s corporate culture is central in understanding much about “Big Blue.” That is also a clue for answering a central question about IBM: How is it that a company viewed as so stable and reliable for decades had so many ups and downs over the course of its 130-year history? The company’s history from its origins in the 1880s to the 1970s was essentially a story of repeated successes, despite enormous difficulties. By the end of the 1970s, however, the company had entered a new era in which it was now large, difficult to run, and slow to make decisions and to take timely actions, and so its subsequent history took on a very different tone. It continued to grow, shrink, reconfigure itself, grow again, and spin off vast sums of profitable revenue while laying off tens of thousands of employees almost without the public hearing about it. How could that be? Observers had been predicting its demise since the mid-1960s, loudly in the early 1990s, and again after 2012. Yet there it stood as this book was being published: bloodied, anemic, slow to move, and grey around the cultural temples but also vigorous, employing vast numbers of young employees around the world while having shed tens of thousands of older ones” (B08BSXJCBP), (Meaning IBM, like all of Big Tech, especially Facebook and Google, is focused on using young “wage slaves” from Communist China and India) “financially sound, and still a major player in one of the world’s most important industries. Again, how could that be? Our purpose is to answer that question.” (B08BSXJCBP)
Fair Use Source: Primary B08BSXJCBP
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by James W. Cortada
IBM – The Rise and Fall and Reinvention of a Global Icon
A history of one of the most influential American companies of the last century.
“Nobody ever lost their job for recommending the purchase of IBM products.” —COMPUTER INDUSTRY FOLK WISDOM
For decades, IBM shaped the way the world did business. IBM products were in every large organization, and IBM corporate culture established a management style that was imitated by companies around the globe. It was “Big Blue, ” an icon. And yet over the years, IBM has gone through both failure and success, surviving flatlining revenue and forced reinvention. The company almost went out of business in the early 1990s, then came back strong with new business strategies and an emphasis on artificial intelligence. In this authoritative, monumental history, James Cortada tells the story of one of the most influential American companies of the last century.
Cortada, a historian who worked at IBM for many years, describes IBM’s technology breakthroughs, including the development of the punch card (used for automatic tabulation in the 1890 census), the calculation and printing of the first Social Security checks in the 1930s, the introduction of the PC to a mass audience in the 1980s, and the company’s shift in focus from hardware to software. He discusses IBM’s business culture and its orientation toward employees and customers; its global expansion; regulatory and legal issues, including antitrust litigation; and the track records of its CEOs. The secret to IBM’s unequaled longevity in the information technology market, Cortada shows, is its capacity to adapt to changing circumstances and technologies.
The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cortada, James W., author.
Title: IBM : the rise and fall and reinvention of a global icon / James W. Cortada.
Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, [2019] | Series: History of computing | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018023090 | ISBN 9780262039444 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: International Business Machines Corporation—History. | Computer industry—United States—History.
Classification: LCC HD9696.2.U6 C67 2019 | DDC 338.7/61004—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018023090
Preface
I From Birth to Identity: IBM in Its Early Years, 1880s–1945
1 Origins, 1880s–1914
2 Thomas J. Watson Sr. and the Creation of IBM, 1914–1924
3 The Emergence of IBM and the Culture of THINK
4 IBM and the Great Depression
5 IBM in World War II, 1939–1945
II IBM the Computer Behemoth, 1945–1985
6 IBM Gets into the Computer Business, 1945–1964
7 How Customers, IBM, and a New Industry Evolved, 1945–1964
8 System 360: One of the Greatest Products in History?
9 “The IBM Way”: How It Worked, 1964–1993
10 “The IBM Way”: What the World Saw, 1964–1993
11 IBM on the Global Stage
12 Two Decades of Antitrust Suits, 1960s–1980s
13 Communist Computers
14 “A Tool for Modern Times”: IBM and the Personal Computer
III A Time of Crisis, 1985–1994
15 Storms, Crisis, and Near Death, 1985–1993
16 IBM’s Initial Response, 1985–1993
17 How IBM Was Rescued, 1993–1994
IV IBM in the New Century
18 A New IBM, 1995–2012
19 Hard Times, Again, and Another Transformation
20 THINK: IBM Today and Its Legacy
Author’s Note: In the Spirit of Transparency
Bibliographic Essay
Index
“The purpose of this book is to introduce a new generation to IBM’s role by telling the story of its long history, its culture and values, and, most important, explain how it helped to shape the world in which we live, a process still unfolding. I argue that it is essential to understand its corporate culture, one that academics and reporters found difficult to describe but that they recognized was essential to describe. Published accounts of IBM offer insufficient insights. IBM is also a multinational company operating around the world, so we need to understand its role in international disputes. Is it an American corporation or is it so globalized that only its senior leaders are U.S. citizens? What are the implications for Russia, China, Germany, the United States, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Australia, and so many other countries?”
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The Prehistory of Office Automation
“Elsewhere (mainly in New York and Detroit) the frantic growth in statistical and bookkeeping activities, bootstrapped by the Census Bureau of the US government, was fueling a new industry: calculating machines. In 1924 Hollerith’s Tabulating Machine Company of New York changed its name to International Business Machines (IBM). Other inventors created useful business machines too. In 1922 National Cash Register (NCR) of Ohio sold more than two million electrical cash registers (about 90% of the market). In 1925 Burroughs of Detroit introduced a portable adding machine (still weighing quite a bit but “portable” by a strong man).”
“The Bay Area had its share of glory during the boom of office calculators. In 1911 Rodney and Alfred Marchant of Oakland began selling one of the many clones of the Odhner arithmometer, and in 1918 their chief engineer, the Swedish-born Carl Friden, built an original model that established the company as one of the most innovative in calculators. In 1934 Friden would start building his own electromechanical calculators, some of the most sophisticated and most expensive on the market.”
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2013
Subscription Software
“In 2013, Adobe stopped selling copies of its tremendously popular Photoshop and Illustrator programs and instead started to rent them. Microsoft and others would soon follow. The era of “subscription software” had arrived.
Despite providing many economically sound reasons why this move was in the interest of its customers (and of course equally good for the company’s bottom line), Adobe’s announcement was met with a wave of negativity and petitions to reinstate the traditional purchase model. Why? Because many customers didn’t upgrade their software every year, and they resented being put in the position of having to pay up annually or have their software stop working.
Purchasing subscriptions for digital services was not new—cable TV, streaming video, and telephone service are all sold by subscription. Software as a product, however, had been different since the birth of the microcomputer. Even though Adobe’s Photoshop is as much a series of 1s and 0s as a streaming movie, consumers did not experience it that way, because they traditionally did not receive it that way. Since it first went on sale in 1988, Photoshop had been sold as a physical object, packaged on floppy disk, CD, or DVD. It was a physical, tactile, or otherwise visible exchange of money for goods. But once the CD or DVD “packaging” of those 1s and 0s was replaced with the delivery of bits over a network connection, it was only a matter of time until the publisher decided to attach a time limit to that purchase. People were not just confused; they were downright furious.
Over time the advantages for most customers became clear: subscription software can be updated more often, and publishers can easily sell many different versions at different price points. The subscription model also gives consumers the flexibility to make small, incremental purchases without a big up-front investment. Now people who were interested in, but not committed to using, a professional photo-editing suite can spend $40 to try it out for a month, rather than spending thousands of dollars up front for a product suite that might not precisely align with their needs or interests. The advent of subscription software brought with it a new model for enabling fast evolution and innovation in software products that in turn drove competition across a landscape of ecommerce services.”
SEE ALSO: Over-the-Air Vehicle Software Updates (2014)
Purchasing subscriptions for popular software programs has become increasingly popular, replacing the previous model of buying and owning the software.
Pogue, David. “Adobe’s Software Subscription Model Means You Can’t Own Your Software.” Scientific American online, October 13, 2013. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/adobe-software-subscription-model-means-you-cant-own-your-software.
Whitler, Kimberly A. “How the Subscription Economy Is Disrupting the Traditional Business Model.” Forbes online, January 17, 2016.
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2011
Watson Wins Jeopardy!
David Ferrucci (b. 1962)
“For all of the mathematical accomplishments that computers are capable of, a machine that engages people in conversation is still the work of fiction and computer scientists’ dreams. When IBM’s Watson® beat the two best-ever Jeopardy! players—Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter—the dream seemed a little more real. Indeed, when Jennings realized he had lost, he tweaked a line from an episode of The Simpsons to display on his screen: “I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords.”
Unlike chess, for which IBM’s Deep Blue demonstrated domination when it beat the world’s best chess player, Garry Kasparov, in 1996, Jeopardy! is not a game governed by clear and objective rules that translate into mathematical calculations and statistical models. It’s a game governed by finding answers in language—a messy, unstructured, ambiguous jumble of symbols that humans understand as a result of context, culture, inference, and a vast corpus of knowledge acquired by virtue of being a human and having a lifetime of sensory experiences. Designing a computer that could beat a person at this game was a really big deal.
Watson was designed over several years using a 25-person team of multidisciplinary experts in fields that included natural language processing, game theory, machine learning, informational retrieval, and computational linguistics. The team accomplished much of its work in a common war room where the exchange of diverse ideas and perspectives enabled faster and more incremental progress than may have occurred using a more traditional research approach. The goal was not to model the human brain but to “build a computer that can be more effective in understanding and interacting in natural language, but not necessarily the same way humans do it,” according to David Ferrucci, Watson’s lead designer.
Watson’s success was not due to any one breakthrough, but rather incremental improvements in cognitive computing along with other factors, including the massive supercomputing capabilities of speed and memory that IBM could direct to the project, more than 100 algorithms the team had working in parallel to analyze questions and answers, and the corpus of millions of electronic documents Watson ingested, including dictionaries, literature, news reports, and Wikipedia.”
SEE ALSO Computer Is World Chess Champion (1997), Wikipedia (2001), Computer Beats Master at Go (2016)
Contestants Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter compete against Watson at a press conference before the “Man v. Machine” Jeopardy! competition at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York.
Thompson, Clive. “What is I.B.M.’s Watson?” New York Times online, June 16, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/magazine/20Computer-t.html.
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2003
CAPTCHA
“CAPTCHAs are tests administered by a computer to distinguish a human from a bot, or a piece of software that is pretending to be a person. They were created to prevent programs (more correctly, people using programs) from abusing online services that were created to be used by people. For example, companies that provide free email services to consumers sometimes use a CAPTCHA to prevent scammers from registering thousands of email addresses within a few minutes. CAPTCHAs have also been used to limit spam and restrict editing to internet social media pages.
CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. The term was coined in 2003 by computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon; however, the technique itself dates to patents filed in 1997 and 1998 by two separate teams at Sanctum, an application security company later acquired by IBM, and AltaVista that describe the technique in detail.
One clever application of CAPTCHAs is to improve and speed up the digitization of old books and other paper-based text material. The ReCAPTCHA program takes words that are illegible to OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology when scanned and uses them as the puzzles to be retyped. Licensed to Google, this approach helps improve the accuracy of Google’s book-digitizing project by having humans provide “correct” recognition of words too fuzzy for current OCR technology. Google can then use the images and human-provided recognition as training data for further improving its automated systems.
As AI has improved, the ability of a machine to solve CAPTCHA puzzles has improved as well, creating a sort of arms race, as each side tries to improve. Different approaches have evolved over the years to create puzzles that are hard for computers but easy for people. For example, one of Google’s CAPTCHAs simply asks users to click a box that says “I am not a robot”—meanwhile, Google’s servers analyze the user’s mouse movements, examine the cookies, and even review the user’s browsing history to make sure the user is legitimate. Techniques to break or get around CAPTCHA puzzles also drive the improvement and evolution of CAPTCHA. One manual example of this is the use of “digital sweatshop workers” who type CAPTCHA solutions for human spammers, reducing the effectiveness of CAPTCHAs to limit the abuse of computer resources.”
SEE ALSO The Turing Test (1951), First Internet Spam Message (1978)
CAPTCHAs require human users to enter a series of characters or take specific actions to prove they are not robots.