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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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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...
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.
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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.
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.
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.
From the page you linked:
Mandelbrot's contributions
In the 1960s Benoît Mandelbrot started investigating self-similarity in papers such as How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension. This built on earlier work by Lewis Fry Richardson. Taking a highly visual approach, Mandelbrot recognised connections between these previously unrelated strands of mathematics. In 1975 Mandelbrot coined the word fractal to describe self-similar objects which had no clear dimension. He derived the word fractal from the Latin fractus, meaning broken or irregular, and not from the word fractional, as is commonly believed. However, fractional itself is derived ultimately from fractus as well.
From the page on Benoît Mandelbrot
In 1958 the couple moved to the United States where Mandelbrot joined the research staff at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. He remained at IBM for the rest of his working life, becoming an IBM Fellow, and later Fellow Emeritus.
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
It's analogous to the parent's contention about fractals- Benoit Mandelbrot's paper about the length of England's coastline was certainly very important to the study of fractals (and I didn't know he worked for IBM until looking it up just now), but it doesn't constitute a discovery or invention.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
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.
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.
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.
> 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.