Slashdot Mirror
Happy 60th Birthday IBM Research
HockeyPuck writes "On Tuesday, IBM Research celebrated it's 60th Birthday "IBM inventions and discoveries include the programming language Fortran (1957), magnetic storage (1955), the relational database (1970), DRAM (dynamic random access memory) cells (1962), the RISC (reduced instruction set computer) chip architecture (1980), fractals (1967), superconductivity (1987) and the Data Encryption Standard (1974). In the last 12 years, IBM has received 29,021 patents--more than any other company or individual in the world.""
Superconductivity was not discovered by IBM, and it also occurred much earlier than 1987. The BCS theory of superconductivity came out in 1957, and the phenomenon itself was first seen in mercury by Onnes in 1911. And while high-Tc superconducters were first seen at IBM, this occurred in 1986.
From the page you linked:
Mandelbrot's contributions
In the 1960s Benoît Mandelbrot started investigating self-similarity in papers such as How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension. This built on earlier work by Lewis Fry Richardson. Taking a highly visual approach, Mandelbrot recognised connections between these previously unrelated strands of mathematics. In 1975 Mandelbrot coined the word fractal to describe self-similar objects which had no clear dimension. He derived the word fractal from the Latin fractus, meaning broken or irregular, and not from the word fractional, as is commonly believed. However, fractional itself is derived ultimately from fractus as well.
From the page on Benoît Mandelbrot
In 1958 the couple moved to the United States where Mandelbrot joined the research staff at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. He remained at IBM for the rest of his working life, becoming an IBM Fellow, and later Fellow Emeritus.
LSD was invented 60 years ago by Professor Albert Hofman, who will celebrate his 100th birthday come January.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
It's analogous to the parent's contention about fractals- Benoit Mandelbrot's paper about the length of England's coastline was certainly very important to the study of fractals (and I didn't know he worked for IBM until looking it up just now), but it doesn't constitute a discovery or invention.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
FORTRAN is not my favorite language either, but it is a high level programming language. Plug boarding is low level programming. Flipping toggle switches to enter binary op-codes is low level programming. Entering hex codes at a terminal is low level programming.
Writing in assembly language mnemonics is mid-level programming. Heck, before FORTRAN, macro assemblers and a few specialized tool libraries were the bees knees.
What do you consider high level? Java? 4GL?
Your points are well taken but I think the parent was trying to say that FORTRAN is high level, and in fact was the first high level language. Thus, by saying "IBM invented FORTRAN" instead of "IBM invented high level programming" diminished the significance of the invention (not that FORTRAN is insignificant).
is their contribution to the Nazi party by selling them computers which, unless I'm mistaken
You're mistaken. Computers were not invented until the waning days of WW2, and IBM didn't build the 701 until 1952, and the 702 in 1953. IBM's German sub-corp did sell them tabulating equipment in the 1930's, which was used at concentration camps. This arm of IBM was nationalized by the Nazi's in 1941, and IBM HQ lost control of it. Concentration camps were not illegal in time of war, the fact that they were actually extermination camps only came out later. Trying to hold IBM responsible smacks of revisionism.
IBM has a number of firsts in human rights, including:
The first corperation to support the United Negro College Fund in 1944.
and
The first US corperation to mandate equal opportunity employment in 1953.
While SPARC may have been the first VLSI based RISC architecture, I think the IBM 801 architecture may have preceded it. John Cocke at IBM was a seminal thinker in the area and may have developed the RISC concept and was awarded a Turing award for this work, so he might have a claim for the innovation.
I wonder what IBM's exact response was to Bill Gates showing them Windows?
"Thanks Bill, we'll call you, don't call us. In the mean time, have fun with your little program."
Uh, Microsoft developed Windows under contract to IBM, writing to IBM's performance specifications. Windows was originally intended to be the front end for OS/2 and not a standalone product. Microsoft doesn't seem to want to emphasize that part of its history. MS also doesn't emphasize that it developed its first big success, DOS, in the same way, under contract to IBM where IBM specified the feature set and a lot of the internals. I worked on and sold PCs in the late 1980s; we had a copy of Windows v2.x on one of the machines (it was a real dog).
Were it not for the funding from IBM's contracts and the work IBM did in design specification, the first two of Microsoft's successes would never have made it to the sales room.
IBM invented the first 'PC' called Acorn.
Really? I'm pretty sure that the Acorn was a different product from a different company. I'm pretty sure the IBM machine was just called the "IBM Personal Computer".
Unisys (previously Sperry and Burroughs) were the owners of the infamous LZW patent, not IBM.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
> I was always under the impression that David Patterson at
> Berkeley and John Hennessy (now President of Stanford) invented
> the RISC architecture and then took it to Sun? The Patterson bio
> linked to above seems to indicate that he did invent the
> RISC architecture. Huh.
Nope. The IBM 801 project began in 1975, and I'm fairly sure they had a machine up and running 2 or 3 years later, perhaps sooner.
The Stanford work on MIPS didn't begin until 1981. I was in John's group at Stanford at that time, though not working on RISC, and I distinctly remember that among the factors that led to the university work on RISC was early information on the 801 that started to come out of IBM. I believe that the Berkeley work was roughly contemporary with the Stanford project, though perhaps a bit ahead. Dave Paterson's bio claims that RISC I was the first VLSI RISC, and I suspect that's true. Hard as it may be to believe now, the IBM 801 was built at a time when even a simple CPU took many chips. I recall the actual box being perhaps 2-3 feet long, and maybe 1.5 feet high.
In any case, the IBM 801 work clearly came years earlier than either the Stanford or Bekerely projects, and I think John H. and Dave P. would be the first to acknowledge the seminal work of John Cocke and the IBM 801 team. My impression is that the respect was mutual, and that all involved agreed that both the Standford and Berkeley teams made very important later contributions.
I'm pretty sure Turing's first computers at Manchester University had magnetic storage too, and that would pre-date 1955 (possibly the Enigma cracking machines had magnetic storage too?)
IBM labs in Switzerland invented Scanning Tunnelling Microscopy too.
The inventors, Binnig and Rohrer got the Nobel prize for physics in 1986
Steve
GML was invented in IBM in 1969. Here is a history.
It begat SGML in the 80s, which begat XML in the late '90s. When people discuss who invented XML, I roll my eyes, because XML and SGML are standardisations by comittees - the invention occured with GML.
Standardised versions of HTML were SGML applications and now HTML is an XML application (XHTML), so the significance of GML is probably as great as any of the inventions listed.
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!