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.""

Comments

Discoveries?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

What about teleportation?

[YodaToo]

You hardly ever hear about their teleportation research.

Re:What about teleportation?

[jurt1235]

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.

Re:What about teleportation?

[aicrules]

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.

And Yet, IBM Employee Morale At All Time Low

[Anonymous Coward]

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???

Re:Mourning the Loss of Bell Labs

[DrLudicrous]

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.

Re:Slightly more important...

[TwobyTwo]

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.

Re:And yet, after all this time....

[ameline]

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.)