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.""
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.
You hardly ever hear about their teleportation research.
This way to the egress...
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.
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.