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