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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. ^_^
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~ |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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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".
Yah, deep down in the code mine, hacking away with picks and shovels. One of Watson's miners pauses, as his shovel strikes something other than dirt. Down on his knees he goes and carefully brushes the dross away from an enormous nugget of raw code ore, as big as your two fists held together! Now it looks like a shiny, irregularly shaped nugget of source, but he knows as soon as its been cut and polished and compiled and link-edited, the beauty of its FORMAT statements and its computed GOTOs will come shining through...truly a great discovery...FORTRAN was a really valuable find.
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
(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 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?)
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...
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!
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.