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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.""
Don't forget good old MCA. ^_^
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
And they didn't coin the term in that year, according to Wikipedia.
n s_from_classical_analysis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractals#Contributio
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
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.
IBM has received 29,021 patents--more than any other company or individual in the world.
In a related note, The SCO Group, Inc. (SCOX) has announced that they are suing IBM for 29,021 counts of using their intellectual property within IBM inventions.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Yay!
In the last 12 years, IBM has received 29,021 patents--more than any other company or individual in the world
Oooo, patents BAD! EVIL! BAD EVIL!
Wait, so do we like them or not? Aaaaaaa! [Head implodes]
Please help metamoderate.
You hardly ever hear about their teleportation research.
This way to the egress...
We should be celebrating the people of IBM research along with the organization. Several very genius individuals were the driving force behind the listed patents. Of course, IBM was great to house them and help them succeed, but let's bless the baby too, not just the carriage.
stuff |
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.
Gramps!
Scott McNealy to Michael: "Suck my Sun!" Michael Dell to Scott : "Lick my Dell!"
Whilst it's popular and fashionable here on Slashdot to dismiss large corporations, particularly IT behomoths like Big Blue, as a CS student I am impressed by the quality of IBM's research and development. Real work that deserves real patents, and real recognition.
Rather than talk about inventing Fortran, wouldn't it be slightly more impressive to have invented the first widely used high level programming language? I mean, inventing a programming language that is still in use after 50 or so years is a rather impressive feat, but inventing "programming languages" is an order of magnitude more impressive.
...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. **
That's an understatement.
WARNING: If accidentally read, induce vomiting.
"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)"
:eyeroll:
pshhh is that all?
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
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."
It's probably appropriate to mention that IBM Research once had a rival of sorts: Bell Labs. Bell Labs and IBM Research were two of the very few commercial institutions that engaged in basic scientific research -- research that would often yield scientific breakthroughs but much less often commercial success. Now Bell Labs is all but gone, but IBM Research thrives. Thank goodness for IBM Research, and kudos to the IBM managers who still keep the "this quarter" Wall Street monsters at bay in order to spend the billions it takes for science.
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
Clippy!
Some settling may occur during posting.
Thats quite a few useful things :D Give it another 60 years and they'll have their own small planet for research purposes only :p
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
Troll? This guy has some good points...while I disagree about DES - okay, okay, we all know about the NSA and the crackable 56bit stuff...DES still helped the economy and the industry to innovate more and better solutions - what he has to say is not trollish.
"I have discovered Fortran!"
I'm a bit surprised that 29,021 is the record. One would think there would be patent holding firms out there with more than that.
useless sig advice - Read Nabokov.
Magnetic storage is a stupid invention. As if anybody would keep their information on magents when hard disks are so cheap!
Not to mention relational databases. How important is keeping track of your family tree anyway? What's wrong with the old flow-chart-on-paper method?
I wish IBM would invent something useful.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
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???
What a coincidence - I'm celebrating my 60th birthday TODAY! :-)
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
Seriously.
IBM invented the first 'PC' called Acorn. It had a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 microprocessor, 16kb of memory (up to 256k) one or two 160k floppy disk drives and a color monitor. The price tag started at $1,565, which is close to $4,000 in today's dollars.
Too bad 'Top View' didn't fare as well.
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."
Anyway, happy birthday IBM.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Of course, looking at it cynically, MS just uses the rest of the world as their R&D department. Somebody comes up with an idea, MS buys it, steals it, copies it, or does the old "embrace and extend" on it.
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.
It's unfair to say Microsoft only invented Clippy. They have also invented something much worse... the COMBO BOX.
Circumcision is child abuse.
helped them tabulate and record the deaths and methods of death of millions of people
While that's what the Nazis ended up doing with the things, I really doubt it was in the proposal design spec. Just imagine something like:
1. Vendor's proposed system must keep track of all detainees' arrival and disposal times
2. Proposed system must scale to millions of detainees
3. System must work well in environment heavy with air particulates
I bet it was pitched to IBM as needing a way to keep census data or somesuch. Ask the average person in the mid 1930's if they think millions of Polish and Russian Jews are going to be systematically murdered by a complex German government operation and they'll think you're nuts.
And they made up for it by producing .30 cal M1 carbines.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
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.
remove nospam. to email!
The looking at the datastream is not possible in current theory without changing (actually determining) the state of the quanta. By looking at it, you would either alter or receive the data at the place you are looking, and the other side would receive nothing or rubbish. I do not know the complete theory, look at wikipedia.org for more info.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
That is the problem with quantum mechanics: It all looks terribly funny until you try to use it. The side effects are killers. But just read the IBM article which the grandfather linked too, it is pretty clear in describing it. They call it disrupting. Actually it is randomizing the quanta, which will result in a 50/50 state of the quanta in which 50% is left in original state (or ended up in original state) and the other 50% will be altered to the second state. This is pretty disruptive, effects of it are still theoretical too. I guess it will be nice shiny lights as in a transporter. The thing which they do not describe in the article though, is that you will end up with the start situation again (B&C are detangled and both in different places, thus just mirroring the descriptive image of IBM with your source and target switching from left to right), thus being able to transport the object back.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
Yes, people do not seem to want to have copies of themselves running around (by clone or copy), since this does not add up with creationism or god like figures. So this is pretty much OK with religion I would say: No copy, you just quantumshifted a few miles. It really sucks though if not enough B/C pair quanta are available, you will be completely transported (Blue screen of death: Quanta buffer overflow, not enough quanta available, please restart your system or vulcan neck pinch to continu). See it like this: Go bungy(?) jumping and lie about your weight (give a to low number). It will give you a headache or worse. In this case you will end up loosing some unknown parts. If lucky some fat, it not so lucky a random useful part. Most likely you will arrive in an undetermined state (ie a blob, watch enough star trek and it will get too you (-: )
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
Well, I heard it has been used quite successfully as a torture device, and is currently responsible for breaking the will of office workers and turning them into corporate zombies, surely that's worth something?
Al Gore.
I, for one, welcome our old patent wielding overlords
No but, yeah but, no but...
See, when Microsoft talks about innovation, this is exactly what they want to be seen like. Real innovation, like IBM Research, not the vaporware.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Back when I had to take an APL course at Rice University, circa 1972, everonye there called APL "Iverson's Folly". Between it and PL/1 I concluded I hated computers and didn't get back into them for almost 10 years.
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
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.
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
Yeah! There's an invention that all businesses can celebrate! Too bad for the guy who was making a killing off of selling pans to collect funds! There is still good money for those people who know how to fix very old cash registers, as they add character to certain businesses.
(2003ish): IBM discovers cheap labor in India/Bangalore and starts slashing jobs in the US in small but consistent increments over a prolonged time...
--
http://unk1911.blogspot.com/
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?)
This was probably the single biggest casualty of the Bell System breakup. First The Labs had Bellcore sheared off to support the RBOCs, then Lucent/Avaya took a lot of the hardware research. The market pressure that had been absent in the monopoly days burned off a lot of the pure research work as being too blue-sky. Having grown up in the Holmdel NJ area in the 60's & 70's, then getting to work in the central NJ campus in the late 80's just post-breakup, I could see the decline starting. Now the Holmdel facility is on the block. I don't think we'd have seen UNIX or C in the post-monopoly environment. Sic transit...
so i guess your birthday is the celebration of everytime you shat your pants as a child?
pretty weird and negative way to look at the world my friend. there are no innocents...
-
While Microsoft's inventions may not be earth-shattering, many of them are quite practical and reliable. While Google et al are gazing off into the stars, Microsoft is still quite down to earth.
Frink: Nice try floyd, but you were designed for scrubbing, and scrubbing is what you shall do.
Manchester University's "Baby" machine, with Cathode ray tube data storage (The William's Tube, built by Tom Kilburn and Freddy Williams was 1948. This was the first stored program computer that could modify its own code.
Steve
IBM labs in Switzerland invented Scanning Tunnelling Microscopy too.
The inventors, Binnig and Rohrer got the Nobel prize for physics in 1986
Steve
Superconductivity was discovered by Kamerling Onnes in Leiden in 1911. 1987 was an impressive year in superconductivity research because the first material which became superconducting above liquid nitrogen's (as opposed to the much more expensive liquid helium) boiling point was discovered. Of course, this discovery was not made in some IBM research lab, but here at The University of Alabama in Huntsville.
In case my previous post wasn't clear, I meant the discovery of high-temperature superconductors occurred here at UAH. Obviously UAH is in Huntsville, not Leiden.
It talks about 29021 patents. Beside the fact that one, a while ago since it is changing, of the heights of Everest was 29,028 feet, I wonder what that is in PPE, patents per employee. For a big company more patents doesn't mean as much when thought of this way.
Why don't you guys have friends or journals?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
University CS departments have always done OS and language research (I'm thinking specifically of Bertrand Meyer and Eiffel), so something like Unix or C would likely evolved. Remember AT&T was under a consent decree not to sell computer software, so they essentially gave Unix away to universities for the trivial cost of duplicating some mag tapes and manuals.
In general, though, I agree that the current competetive environment is anti-research. If you want to cut costs, those line items that are risky and have a long timeline are vulnerable.
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
Have there been any notable and technical inventions from IBM Research lately (say last 5 to 10 years)? The article mentions the lab's focus has been shifting.
the company's push toward services and software has prompted it to dedicate more of its laboratories toward solving business process problems
I have not seen anything as significant as RDB or Fortran in the last 10 years from the lab.
Generally speaking, I feel that computer science research from academia (research labs, universities) isn't as productive as it used to be. I can't recall any ground breaking work from academia recently (after Internet, I guess). Does this mean computer science research has matured and has reached a point where most of the progress is now made in development by corporation rather than academic research? Or I just do not know about the exciting research projects? Or, as the article suggests, most academic inventions are done outside of the US?
Please enlighten me.
Does anybody know what the name "Winchester" refers to in this case?
:-).
My father worked on this product in the late 60's and beyond, but I never figured out if they were referring to the Mystery House, the boulevard, or the repeating rifle (all from the same family). My guess was that the Mystery House was chosen as a precursor to San Jose Building 5
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
It was named after the rifle or more likely the cartridge. The hard drive had two 30 MB spindles. The cartridge was 0.30 inches in diameter and contained the equivalent of 30 grains of smokeless powder.
There was a hatchet job book on this a few years back, trying to imply IBM was somehow responsible for the Holocaust. Bottom line, IBM sold them to the German government for census data initially. Once they were in German hands, they were reconfigured for other purposes by employees of IBM's German subsidiary.
One could complain about the continued sale when it was pretty obvious (from our viewpoint) that the machines were being used for ill purposes, but explain to me just how IBM was going to approach that issue given the fact that they had no firm proof of anything? Particularly since the employees doing the retrofitting for concentration camp records were German citizens who were under penalty of imprisonment in the same camps if they failed to do their patriotic duty.
Bottom line, it was impossible to be a rational businessman and do anything about the Nazis from the standpoint of a commercial supplier.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Has IBM's 2500-patent-per-year pace of carving out territory in innovation-space really done the world that much good?
I think we should stop and reflect how much more money Microsoft has than IBM and they've done far too little with it. They have a similar monopoly compared to Bell and IBM and yet research hasn't benefited nearly as much.
I believe you forgot the near-dead, services based sellout known as National Cash Register. They only share small amounts of history in the early times of the cash register. After that, they're mostly separate. Now, they both do their own types, but on a much lesser scale than known previously - current NCR machines are just NCR labeled hardware with NT and BassPoiNT loaded in.
As for both IBM/NCR's R&D divisions, they are probably best stated as standstill due to "globalization". The kind that sells off anything, even land to land grab happy entities that overstate their moral character, or moves jobs (uncompetitively) to places far enough out of the US to keep them well out of reach of any interested US citizen willing to rightfully take back his job in the "not-so-free market".
Maybe the human factor might need to be put back in economics before a C-level be publicly executed (and with noone to care to act as a witness) to return the lack of their organization's humanity in kind.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
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!
Guessing about you? I have no idea what that means.
So your point is, its a big bad world, get over it. Fine. My point is that organizations need to start looking beyond profit and start seeing their impact on the world. Turning a blind eye to the environmental and human rights abuses in China to make a quick buck does not a better world make. The need to recognize that they need to invest back in the communities that allowed them to flurish. Could IBM have come up in the horribly corrupt, bribery driven Indian business environment? Could IBM have been so dynamic in the state controlled industrial complex of communist China? In a word, no.
In total does IBM actually owe the US anything? You're right it doesn't. It shouldn't expect anything either. The government uses our tax money to fund research that often ends up growing into the inventions that make corporations rich. From now on, we ought to be sure that the tax payer's investment in fundamental research shows us some dividneds, maybe through taking a direct percentage of the gross on any sales of products using that technology. Clearly, in the new world model those investments aren't going to pay off in the form of jobs. And to be honest, I don't give a fuck about the benefit of a cheap Chinese electronic product as a return for all that outsourcing. Give me a real cash return on my investment via taxes in the technologies that we're just giving away today.
yea i stole your sig- whats the big deal, it sucked anyway.
Huh. I learned APL a couple of years later, and it was what convinced me I really liked computers. Perhaps it was because the numerical analysis and statistical modeling problems I was working on were well-suited to the APL notation, but even without that: an interpreted language, symbolic debugging, garbage collection for intermediate memory use, the ability to write self-modifying code. Cool stuff, especially for the time.
I still use an APL interpreter on Linux in preference to a calculator for many casual operations...
Surprisingly that isn't totally true. Whatever, their product groups may do, from speaking to some guys from Microsoft Research at a recent conference and from other sources, they hire lots of PhDs and are doing blue-sky research esp. in the bio-computing area. Also, look at the number and quality of papers from MS Research in any of the theoretical computer science conferences. In fact, a friend of mine recently completed his PhD in machine learning and had an offer from Google and MS Research and took the latter. According to him (and he has interned with MS), Google Labs is much more product focused than MSR and he was convinced that he would get more freedom to work on his interests in MS Research (and they apparently pay more to fresh PhDs).
All this and they couldn't make their own operating system for the PC.
Huh. That's...interesting. Just wondering, what do they call bio-computing (I can think of a few things that come under that heading, potentially).
The stats I'd seens showed that, percentage-wise, Google had more PhD's, though that still has them losing the overall numbers game obviously even if that's true.
I'm interested though - if MS does have all these researchers, where are the cool results? Is the problem that they have one creative group of people doing cool research, another group doing production, and no way to connect the two? Because I've gotta say, I've never seen MS come out with anything particularly clever, either as a finished product or even a feature of a product.
wasn't it IBM that was supplying the Nazi's with devices to sort the jews before they were executed? so you want to celebrate what again?