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Happy 60th Birthday IBM Research

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the everybody-likes-fractals dept.

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.""

18 of 212 comments (clear)

  1. IBM did not discover or invent fractals by LeonGeeste · · Score: 2, Interesting

    And they didn't coin the term in that year, according to Wikipedia.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractals#Contribution s_from_classical_analysis

    I know it's fashionable to inflate the importance of whomever or whatever you're trying to laud, but this is just a little over-reaching. Anyone catch any of the other discoveries?

    --
    Rank my idea: http://www.sinceslicedbread.com/node/531
    1. Re:IBM did not discover or invent fractals by AugstWest · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I could go ask him, his office is just down the hall.

      I'll never forget my first day here, a cow-orker was showing me around, and I walked by an office door that said "Mandelbrot."

      He's the nicest guy. He's 81, but you'd think he was about 60. Very funny, and very personable.

  2. Discoveries? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Does anyone else notice that all of the "Inventions and Discoveries" are actually all inventions? Perhaps a nit-picky point, but there are no discoveries listed... (granted, electron tunneling is mentioned in TFA, but the specific paragraph citing "inventions and discoveries" lists none.

  3. What about teleportation? by YodaToo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You hardly ever hear about their teleportation research.

    --
    This way to the egress...
    1. Re:What about teleportation? by jurt1235 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      That is because they compare it with sending a fax. They show that the fax machine they would device with this quantum technique would completely disrupt the original, while sending a perfect version to the other side, which would require the receiver to send it back to you again, again distroying his version, etc etc etc.. So at this moment totally impractical technique at this moment for faxing. The only usefull thing you could do with this, is like teleport a person, but since IBM is not in traveling, but more in business machines (hence the name), they will just not develop this since it does not add in a practical way to the bottomline of the company (read the article about 60 years of research department).
      The other problem with this teleportation is that it looks like to me that they need to transport a same amount of quanta to the receiver already from the entangled pair. Also this should be a specific entangled pair, else it would be received somewhere else. So at the moment you want to send a fax for example, it will go fast and very accurate, however, the preparation sort of takes all the efficiency out of it.

      --

      My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
    2. Re:What about teleportation? by aicrules · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Waaaaait a minute. You say their teleportation basically destroys the local version and creates an exact replica on the other end....so it's NOT good for inanimate object transport. However, you then say the only useful thing you could do is transport a PERSON?!? So, you think it makes sense to clone people repeatedly while destroying the original each time?? Even throwing out the views of the religious segment of our population, that doesn't exactly seem like a good idea.

    3. Re:What about teleportation? by dario_moreno · · Score: 2, Interesting

      you cannot create a perfect copy without destroying the original since you have to measure the state of each of the atoms of the original, thereby destroying the "quantumness" of those states (ie the fact that they can be a superposition of eigenstates). Nevertheless with quantum teleportation you can transport the information stating that an atom is in a superposition of states (which might be the case of consciousness).

      --
      Google passes Turing test : see my journal
  4. And yet, after all this time.... by jeaster · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ...they still haven't learned how to hang onto top performers, make their employees happy to work there, or make money on an account without slashing headcount. Don't even get me started on the low pay. ** Warning; comments above are from a bitter, underpayed, overworked employee. They have not been filtered through management or spun through PR, so they may contain the truth. Please treat accordingly. **

    1. Re:And yet, after all this time.... by ameline · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I worked at IBM in Toronto for 8 years. And I agree with some of your sentiments, but it's not always as you portray. At the time, promotions were few and far between -- in my observation, you were either on the fast-track, and got promoted, or you weren't. Alias has been much better to me in this regard (and in many other regards as well).

      I was never a really great fit for IBMs culture (or to be specific, the culture at the Toronto Lab at the time) -- I'm too much of a loose cannon for their tastes. (Although at my present employer, I probably don't qualify for that description, as there are some looser ones around here -- Yes, Duncan, I'm thinking about you :-) But I do believe that having some smart and talented people who are not always doing what they're told is a very good thing.

      At least one person I worked with there (shared an office with for a time) is now an IBM Fellow. (Deservedly so, I should add -- he (Kevin Stoodley) is one of the sharpest people I've ever met or have the privilege of working with -- I could count the others in his league I've worked with on the fingers of 1 hand.)

      In hindsight, overall I found IBM to be a good place to work -- they treated people with respect, and didn't jerk anyone around so far as I could see. Now, being older, and perhaps a bit more grown up (ok not that much :-), I would work there again if circumstances were appropriate, and the right opportunity arose. (That said, I'm not looking to leave Alias unless the Autodesk merger competly butchers the culture here -- have to wait and see what happens.)

      --
      Ian Ameline
  5. 60? by Stu+L+Tissimus · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I mean, 50 or 75 I could understand, but 60? Bah! Multiples of 10.

    No, but really, IBM Research basically made the computer what it is today. So happy birthday to one of the most innovative groups on the face of the earth. They basically made the computer what it is today, you know.... Just about everything that's more complicated than a microwave has some RISC derivative in it.

    --
    A wise man once said, "wtf h4x."
  6. And Yet, IBM Employee Morale At All Time Low by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Sure, Happy Birthday-- but news has it that internal morale surveys show that IBM (U.S.A.) employees aren't happy campers. Maybe it's the memos and conference calls directing managers to identify every outsourcable position in their U.S. organization? Great lets celebrate those 29K accomplishments- but lets also ask where the research for the next 29K patents is going to be done. Any guesses???

  7. IBM says: "We are so gay." by Dante+Shamest · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Seriously.

  8. Re:Mourning the Loss of Bell Labs by DrLudicrous · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I agree. I was a summer intern at Bell Labs in 2000, and more or less watched the disintegration of one of the greatest research institutions ever happen in realtime. It was a sad thing to witness, though much of what led to Bell Labs current situation occurred before summer of '00, but the financial situation and layoffs are what began then. If you want to talk about interesting groundbreaking research, it's Bell Labs hands down. These are the people that invented the transistor and the laser, discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation, and churned out multiple generations of talented chemists, engineers, physicists, and computer scientists (I believe UNIX and the C programming language also came out of Bell Labs). It's demise should be lamented, though I still have hope that one day it might return to its former glory as a place of fundamental research, instead of research oriented exclusively towards developing profitable merchandise in the short term due to the demands of Wall Street.

  9. Re:Slightly more important... by TwobyTwo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The history of Fortran is quite interesting. My understanding is that John Backus and the team who built Fortran were so worried that assembler programmers wouldn't trust a compiler to generate code fast enough for the slow machines of the day that they implemented a slew of optimizations that were still viewed as aggressive 10-15 years later. Keep in mind that the compiler itself had to run on these slow machines, with limited memory (tens of KBytes), and mostly punch cards for storing object code, math libraries, etc. By the way, I met Backus once or twice in the late 1970's when I was a very junior member of the programming staff at IBM. He was already something of a legend in the languages community, and I've never met anyone in the field who was kinder, more down to earth, or more interested in having a chat with anyone, regardless of how old or young. The field needs more people like him.

  10. you forgot one by tsmithnj · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The first corperation to support the United Negro College Fund in 1944.

    and

    The first US corperation to mandate equal opportunity employment in 1953.

    AND

    first company not to genetically discriminate

  11. Re:Slightly more important... by Magnusite · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Oh, I seem to have read your post the wrong way. Well, in that case, nevermind.</rrv>

    Yes, I do believe that IBM and John Backus developed the earliest high level language.

  12. Re:The Winchester Disk Drive by rkww · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It may be connected with with IBM Hursley, their UK laboratories in Winchester, England, which did some of the original development of disk drives. IBM has a review and discussionof disk 'file' innovation in the 25 years up to 1981 which describes the Winchester technology in some detail, but doesn't seem to identify where the work was carried out.

  13. Re:Slightly more important... by TwobyTwo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Well, as I understand it, there were some earlier efforts, such as Speedcoding by Backus himself, so people had some sense that you could program at an abstraction above the machine level. From what I've read, things like Speedcoding weren't fast, and so speed was indeed viewed as a big hurdle. That said, my impression is that languages like FORTRAN were much more comprehensive and ambitious than earlier efforts, so your implication that people viewed it as magic (ahem, I meant AI) may be quite right.