IBM Turns 100 189
adeelarshad82 writes "On this day in 1911, IBM started as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (C-T-R). It wasn't until 1924 that the company changed their name to IBM. Needless to say that a 100-year milestone is quite the feat. While some of us might know IBM for its recent "Jeopardy"-playing Watson computer, a look back shows that IBM has a long history of innovation, from cheese slicers (yes, really) and the tech behind Social Security to the UPC bar code and the floppy disk. One of the most notable leaps of faith IBM took was in 1964 with the introduction of System/360, a family of computers that started the era of computer compatibility. To date the company has invested nearly $30 billion in technology."
Zero to Godwin (Score:2, Informative)
Let's not forget helping the Nazi's round up undesirables!
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Actually they sold the machines which helped to track the jews their death numbers etc.. the ovens probably were built by Krupp.
The gas btw. was manufactured by IG Farben.
All of these companies still exist, although IG Farben now has a different name.
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Actually also dont forget about the Bush family, they earned a shitload of money with their Nazi ties as well. Without Hitler there never would have been George Bush and George W Bush have been president of the US.
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Prescott Bush.
Convicted war profiteer, indicted for trading with the enemy.
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Right. This is from the same ADL that spawned Adam Gadahn.
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Actually they sold the machines which helped to track the jews their death numbers etc.. the ovens probably were built by Krupp. The gas btw. was manufactured by IG Farben. All of these companies still exist, although IG Farben now has a different name.
IG Farben helped operate Auschwitz so that it could use its slave labor in its chemical plants, but the Zylon B gas was manufactured by the Degussa AG subsidiary Degesch. Degussa AG still exists under the same name.
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IG farben was spited in several of it's components. the four largest ones were bayer, BASF, agfa and hoechst. they bought the smaller ones during the years, and agfa is now part of aventis.
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Let's not forget helping the Nazi's round up undesirables!
The slideshow kinda skips from 1924 to 1956, doesn't it?
Happy Birthday IBM (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Happy Birthday IBM (Score:4)
I wonder if they'll make it another 100 years?
I mean, they got this far by spotting tech trends and successfully parlaying them into products. They don't seem to be doing much of that anymore.
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IBM's new business model is cannibalizing other innovative companies, gutting them (through layoffs and offshoring), and then using the ensuing short-term profits to continue the cycle. It's evil and demoralizing for employees of IBM who always have a Damocles sword of "resource actions" hanging over their head regardless
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Its not just IBM, far too many companies have abandoned everything except short-term shareholder gains.
I think the root cause of this (and other problems plaguing the western world and its companies) comes from the changes in the mid-late 20th century where the typical shareholder mix of public companies changed away from businessmen and rich people who cared about the companies they bought to investment funds, managed funds, brokerages, day traders and others who see shares as a short term investment to be
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The federal government in the US was a large part of the problem. If they graduated the capital gains tax phase in such that you needed to hold stocks for a couple years to get the full benefit of the capital gains rate, increased the short term holding substantially and limited people to only having one round trip trade per day, a lot of these problems would go away.
Enron, as big a mess as that was, resulted in far more people making money than losing money, due to the way in which is collapsed. A relative
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Is anyone really surprised banks and bankers are the problem? They're middlemen to the extreme. Not only do they not create any wealth, they actually get in the way of honest wealth creation.
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Is anyone really surprised banks and bankers are the problem? They're middlemen to the extreme. Not only do they not create any wealth, they actually get in the way of honest wealth creation.
Really? Banks provide loans that allow MANY small businesses to get off the ground. Without pooling the wealth of of the local community you won't have enough resources for individuals to make those loans because it will be too risky and they don't have the time, skills or knowledge in order to properly evaluate those risks and make those loans. Banks are about as much as a useless middleman as a butcher is the middleman in your food consumption.
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Yea, I know! Friedman, Welch, the "corporate raiders" etc. certainly don't help, and the worst thing is that it created a gen of MBAs who were taught the horrible stuff.
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IBM has converted itself from a company based on selling boxes, and providing services as a side effect, to a company selling services who may sell you some boxes to run the services. That means that IBM's innovations will no longer (or at least far less) be in the field of hardware and software, which is of interest to Slashdot readers, and much more in the field of packaging and delivering services. It doesn't mean they have stopped innovating at all, it means that they are innovating in an area that is m
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. That means that IBM's innovations will no longer (or at least far less) be in the field of hardware and software...
IBM is still a world-leader in solid-state research, and develops and releases fundamental hardware advances on a regular basis. Its software innovation includes the remarkable AI demonstration of Watson with Jeopardy this year.
Re:Happy Birthday IBM (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. IBM hasn't been doing much innovation over the past 10 years
It is one of the few American businesses today that still vigorously conducts basic research. It is also constantly churning out new technological innovations that invigorate the entire field of computing (copper-on-silicon, silicon-on-insulator, etc.).
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Sure, there are tons of companies out there who are in it for the long haul (for themselves *and* their employees) with great quality and support, but few people are willing to pay the premium for it. On top of that, we
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I'd disagree, It seems there's a steady stream of articles in IEEE or other magazines about cool research that IBM is doing (e.g. http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-06-ibm-graphene-based-circuit.html [physorg.com]). I think the issue is that the current problems driving innovation in companies as big as IBM are much more technical and thus more difficult to explain to a general audience, except as "20% faster" or other forgettable phrases. I suspect there's a lot of cool stuff going on.
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A fantastic achievement, Here's to the next 100 years.
I tend to think of IBM as being older than 100 years because the punch-card tabulating equipment, invented by Herman Hollerith, that was the mainstay of its dates to 1889, and I have viewed his Tabulating Machine Company (formed in 1896) as the true origin of the business that is IBM today. Anyone who remembers the days of punch cards remembers those Hollerith codes -- a coding scheme in use for nearly a century. It has always seemed to me the "senior member" of the four-way merger, the only one that was tr
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Here's a nice movie [engadget.com] IBM made to commemorate the last 100 years. It appeared in my submission [slashdot.org] from January that didn't get picked up. Oh well.
Other uses IBM found for its technology (Score:3, Informative)
IBM and the Holocaust [ibmandtheholocaust.com]
IBM and the Holocaust on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
Re:Other uses IBM found for its technology (Score:5, Insightful)
Hitler used IBM punchcard systems purchased in the 30's to facilitate the Holocaust. Of course, if IBM hadn't sold them the punchcard machines, the Holocaust would never have happened.
Next up, we'll tackle Boeing's complicity in 9/11.
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Re:Other uses IBM found for its technology (Score:5, Informative)
In 1933. And the Hollerith machines were not "designed" in Germany. In fact, we'd been using such machines since 1890 for OUR census. IBM's entire revenue revolved around selling tabulating machines.
Also, Hollerith machines were not designed for "camp-tracking." Census machines were re-purposed for that task.
you missed the other part (Score:4, Informative)
where IBM kept in contact with its Switzerland headquarters, was in trouble several times with the government for dealing with 'blacklisted' countries, the strings it pulled to get around those limitations, and one of whose officials was denied entry into the US after the war.
and then there are the ways that the subsidiaries, after the war, were brought back into the fold of IBM, along with all the profits they had reaped from their wartime experiences, which were meticulously recorded.
Re:you missed the other part (Score:4, Insightful)
and then there are the ways that the subsidiaries, after the war, were brought back into the fold of IBM, along with all the profits they had reaped from their wartime experiences, which were meticulously recorded
You're right - IBM should have forced those subsidiaries out of business for their complicity in the German war machine. In fact, all companies in Germany that helped out the Nazi regime should have been closed down. All those horrible people should have been forced into bread lines for their crimes.
I mean, that's basically what they did after WWI, and it seemed to work out pretty well.
im talking about the SS, not the army (Score:2)
Dehomag was intimately involved with the SS, from the Eugenics program to the holocaust. Im not talking about the Army.
Dehomag was successfull after the war, and many of the same people just worked for IBM, they re-integrated the performance metrics so that employees who had done well during the war kept their special bonus point style things.
IBM could have at least taken a page from Volkswagen and several other manufacturing companies and participated in the reconciliation process in the 1990s.
Re:Other uses IBM found for its technology (Score:5, Interesting)
You must have missed the part where the Nazi regime decided to stuff people they didn't like into camps while starving them, beating them, working them to the bone, then executing them.
Personally, I believe if you're going to hold IBM (or Ford or Bayer or any other trendy 'you helped the holocaust' company) responsible, then you should also hold trees responsible. Trees provided the wood that built the guard towers, that held the barbed wire fences in place, and built the barracks. Bricks, fire, lead, and rope should also be investigated.
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Ford's a different story from the others. Henry Ford was known as a Nazi sympathizer and anti-semite who received senior Nazi officials to his home.
please i invite you to read Mr Black's book (Score:3)
it is not propaganda. almost every line in the entire book is well cited and documented.
we are not talking about Ford here. a truck can be used for anything.
the punch card systems had to be specifically designed, and then an IBM technician had to specifically go and maintain them, they were massively maintenance-intensive pieces of equipment. and punch cards were at the center of a lot of SS operations, including the holocaust (there were machines in the death camps), but also stuff like the Night and Fog
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"we are not talking about Ford here. a truck can be used for anything."
"the punch card systems had to be specifically designed, and then an IBM technician had to specifically go and maintain them, "
Because punch cards are specifically designed to kill people......
Trucks are trucks, data is data. The world as a whole didn't have much trouble with the Nazi's up through 1936, and even then it was another three years before the war broke out.
back then, data was not data (Score:2)
if you had a technician from Dehomag walking into a camp every couple of weeks to make adjustments, fix broken parts, do routine maintenance, etc, it is kind of hard to argue that 'data was just data'.
if you had to have Dehomag technicians design the hole punch cards, with holes for Jew, and then how much Jew (1/8, 1/4, etc) and so forth and so on
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Ford also built the Bombers that dropped the majority of America's bombs (B-24's dropped more bombs by tonnage than B-17's. They flew higher, farther, and faster than the B-17. Ford broke ground on the Willow Run bomber plant in late 1941 and revolutionized Consolidated aircraft's borderline archaic production techniques) on the Nazi empire. Had the Nazi's won the war we'd be reading about those "war crimes."
Of course Ford was as senile as a brick by the end of the 30's. His anti-semitism did not make him u
Speak for yourself. (Score:2)
I have abandoned business deals when the ethics of the deal were questionable.
Sorry to break this to you, but lack of morals is not an imperative to make business.
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You must have missed the part where the Nazi regime decided to stuff people they didn't like into camps while starving them, beating them, working them to the bone, then executing them.
Personally, I believe if you're going to hold IBM (or Ford or Bayer or any other trendy 'you helped the holocaust' company) responsible, then you should also hold trees responsible. Trees provided the wood that built the guard towers, that held the barbed wire fences in place, and built the barracks. Bricks, fire, lead, and rope should also be investigated.
"Your honor, I don't deny I killed him. But if I hadn't, he'd of died of something or other eventually anyway."
Re:Other uses IBM found for its technology (Score:5, Informative)
You also must have missed the first few years of the World War where the US knew about the atrocities but decided to do nothing about it or Ford-Werke, the division of Ford in Germany or the 'neutral' Swiss supplying weapons and bankrolling the operations with Jewish deposits.
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First of all do you really think IBM in the US has much control over what happened at IBM Germany and Poland after the war started? Poland was occupied by Germany very quickly and I am pretty sure they didn't let money or information flow from Poland to the US really easily.
I am sure any communication was completely halted by December 7th.
Also These where Census tracking systems do you really think they where any different than the off the self ones in use for the Census and other systems like the ones used
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So according to you the German government forced IBM to create those subsidiary companies and then to do business with them? Otherwise, how did they not have a choice?
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--Bentsen
Re:Other uses IBM found for its technology (Score:4, Insightful)
Computers in the 1930s weren't the general purpose machines we have today. You didn't just buy a computer, bring it home, and plug it in. There was no off-the-shelf software. Computers came with a team of IBM engineers in white lab coats.
If Boeing's engineers had been in the cockpit on 9/11 and had been paid to fly in to buildings, then Boeing would be as complicit in 9/11 as IBM is in the Holocaust.
And no one is saying it would not have happened without IBM. But that does not diminish IBM's role.
Re:Other uses IBM found for its technology (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, that's actually the thesis of that (national award-winning) book. "[W]ithout IBM's machinery, continuing upkeep and service, as well as the supply of punch cards, whether located on-site or off-site, Hitler's camps could have never managed the numbers they did." (p. 352) Germany had plans for a long-delayed census of ethnicity, which was not feasible until IBM came to the rescue in 1933, which was followed soon afterward by laws barring Jews from citizenship or marrying Aryans. Early predictions of ~500K Jews in Germany were revised upwards, identifying 2M afterwards.
"This activity was not only countenanced by Thomas Watson and IBM in America, Black argues, but was actively encouraged and financially supported, with Watson himself traveling to Germany in October 1933 and the company ramping up its investment in its German subsidiary from 400,000 to 7,000,000 reichsmarks — about $1 million.[17] This injection of American capital allowed Dehomag to purchase land in Berlin and to construct IBM's first factory in Germany, Black charges, thereby "tooling up for what it correctly saw as a massive financial relationship with the Hitler regime."[17]" (from Wikipedia, etc.)
More generally, if we're going to gush about IBM's history, intellectual honesty demands that we include the well-known black marks, too.
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You leaving out relevant details. Did Watson travel to Nazi Germany to push for the purchase of Hollerith machine for the the oppression and eventual genocide of minorities?
Or did Watson travel to Nazi Germany to push for the purchase of Hollerith machines for the purposes of Germany's seemingly innocent upcoming general census (remember that this is 5 years before Kristallnacht, and 3 years before Berlin would host a very-much-not-boycotted Olympics)?
Other pertinent facts: Dehomag's upper management was in
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And is that complicity?
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Okay, let's say someone wants to gun down students in a school. You know they want to gun down students in the school. Instead of calling the police, you meet the guy who is going to gun down the students and see what his plans are. You laugh at his idea to go in with an old, rusty M-1 and blaze away. You instead help him pick out a good sniper rifle with a scope. You teach him the finer points of camouflage.
Yes, you did not actually cause the school massacre and some sort of school massacre would have
they have tried to cover it up (Score:3)
that is IBM's main problem. Companies like Ford and IG Farben have opened archives and they have even participated in restitution programs.
IBM has not.
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Then let us arrest all technological development, lest it facilitate some future evil.
and other as well ... (Score:2)
Henry Ford and the Holocaust [wikipedia.org]
Alexander Graham Bell and the Holocaust [wikipedia.org]
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My examples are a bit more serious than Hugo Boss or IBM. Bell and Ford ideologically supported the Nazis. (Spreading antisemic books, pushing eugenics laws in California.) Check out my links above. It's worth it.
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The Germans used Hollerith machines also in occupied Norway to organize drafting people into German service.
Norwegian resistance fighters blew up the machines. Twice.
The things IBM made... (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked for a large organization in Chicago that had the "gold" IBM support contract back in the early 90s; they would show up at 2 am Sunday morning to replace a keyboard if necessary. Our main contact was a guy who had been with the company for 30+ years and he would mention some of the things he'd had to fix, in addition to the standard computer stuff: scales for weighing meat in the meat packing district and the thing that was most surprising: the clock on the Wrigley Building. Apparently IBM didn't actually out-and-out make the clock mechanism but had bought some company that had and they inherited the support contract. He mentioned having to get some gears specially made when it broke down.
The thing I thought was so ahead of its time was the wireless device he had that was essentially a large, two-line blackberry that he'd carry on his shoulder with a strap; it would beep and he'd flip the cover open, read the message, then type some sort of response. I remember he'd use it to order parts and within an hour(!) another guy would show up with them, a new ps/2 mouse, a monitor, or a reel-to-reel tape drive for the as/400. I was surprised IBM never thought to market that device; much like Apple is reluctant to talk about their ipod touch-based POS terminals, he wasn't too keen about showing it off or even talking about it.
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Having had one of those devices back in the early 90's it was just a 2 way pager, They never got really popular, the prices made early text messages seem cheap, water cooler talk placed it at 25 cents for each outbound message but no idea what they really cost. You can still get the modern versions have a client that thinks pagers make more sense for on-call so they are still passing around a clamshell 2 way pager. They looked at me funny when I told them the monitoring software could take care of dispat
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Supposedly Apple is doing very quiet testing with third parties for that system (Old Navy/Gap is apparently testing them), which Apple calls EasyPay. It's quite sketchy, but it appears Apple has been inundated with requests for more information about them so they could be deployed elsewhere.
Only 30 billion? (Score:2)
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From TFA:
The company invested $5 billion in [system/360], about $30 billion today, but the gamble paid off.
Summary is wrong.
30 Billion on Research? (Score:2)
That's my new yardstick for insane figures. When someone says we spent 700 billion bailing out the financial companies, I'm going to picture 20 IBM sized companies funding 100 years of research.
Re:30 Billion on Research? (Score:5, Informative)
Also, most of the $700 Billion of that bailout were loans that have been paid back. There's still a ludicrous about of wasted money, like the $200 million that a bankers wife took, and then deposited in a bank, and reaped the interest! But in general, it was a short term loan to keep the economy moving. And it worked. Get over it.
contrarian (Score:2)
the 'bailout' was a lot more than the 700 billion TARP money.
fannie and freddie, for example.
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it worked? really? Boy that unemployment is sure going down real fast!
You really need to understand how capitalism works, and how important it is that failures.. FAIL and that there is no such as too big to fail.
I'll wager $723.42 that IBM goes another 100 years (Score:4, Interesting)
Now, we're using Rational and Eclipse to manage Websphere projects.
Go figure.
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*knell
Re:I'll wager $723.42 that IBM goes another 100 ye (Score:4, Funny)
It's easy to get confused when it's all three letter acronyms: IBM death knell - JFK death knoll (yes I went there) - D&D death gnoll, it just goes on and on and on.
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*flind
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The colossal size and huge brand reputation of IBM is enough to keep a company going for a very long time. Long enough, in fact, to change its business model significantly before having to actually face real danger of going under.
We see companies disappearing all the time, but a lot of the time, it's actually due to a merger or acquisition. As long as you can avoid being acquired and having your assets sold at a fire sale by some short term raider or a competitor, businesses have a good chance of weatheri
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My aunt was one of those layoffs. She spent 25 years with IBM (in finance) and "retired" early at 55. They gave her the choice of take some early retirement package or be laid off outright.
Of course, she's happy living in northern Washington, well away from San Jose.
Lying about their age (Score:2)
the original guy didn't incorporate at first (Score:2)
he was just a dude selling stuff. and fighting patent lawsuits (some things dont change)
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I seem to recall they were in business in the nineteenth century, not as IBM of course...
Correct. Herman Hollerith invented the mainstay of the IBM product line in 1989, sold his punch card tabulating machines to the U.S. Census Bureau in 1890, and incorporated the Tabulating Machine Company in 1896. IBM was the result of a 4-way merger, but any one of the other 3 businesses could have been left out and we would still have an IBM - not so the Tabulating Machine Company, it is the predecessor of IBM.
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Anybody have an IBM Clock? (Score:2)
They used to be in the old terminal at Detroit Metro (since remodeled) and in a few GM plants.
pff (Score:2)
Big deal, Id do it in half the time.
Pretty impressive all things considered! (Score:4, Interesting)
So far, the comments are the predictable ones I'd expect -- the recent love of offshoring, sell-off of products, etc. But it's pretty amazing to see what they did after almost dying in the late 80s after they missed the client/server and PC boat. I don't agree with a lot of their short sighted moves, but changing from a hardware to a consulting company without people realizing it is an interesting feat.
Stories I've been told describe the IBM prior to this period as a pretty amazing place to work in terms of benefits and the tech you were able to work on. Don't forget that all of that was possible because back in the day, margins on hardware were orders of magnitude higher than they were now. Plus, IBM had a total lock on the mainframe market (still does pretty much, but less work needs to be done in this space now.) When they could get a much higher margin for selling boxes, they could lavish R&D money on the people who designed those boxes, training and salaries on the people who supported them, AND still have plenty left over for the execs and shareholders. You know, the "golden age of computing".... Now, most hardware is in the single-digit percent margin category (except for Apple stuff) and there's no money to be made in it. "Consulting" and managed services will bring in millions more than a hardware purchase; they can throw half the population of India at a customer and still make billions even if it takes longer to get results...which is where we US techies are stuck right now. In particular, the stories of older IBM techies being told to move to India or Brazil or leave paint a pretty sad state of affairs. (Side note, this trend will never reverse until we can kick everyone's hyperfocus on the stock market and corporate earnings. No public company is able to do anything that isn't guaranteed to instantly pay off anymore.)
That said, the hardware they do still make (or at least OEM) is pretty good. And, if you're willing to pay the premium for this gear, System x and BladeCenter support is still done in the US. Documentation is horrible because of the huge decentralized nature of the company, but I've been able to call these guys up and get an answer in 5 minutes. Still, it's kind of ironic that IBM hires teams of customers to come in and basically rewrite the documentation for some of their products (see Redbooks.)
Also, don't forget that IBM is one of the only companies big enough to put serious money into research anymore. In my mind, that's really important. Where are all the CS, physics and EE Ph. D's going to work now that Bell Labs is gone and HP only does product research?
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Also, don't forget that IBM is one of the only companies big enough to put serious money into research anymore. In my mind, that's really important. Where are all the CS, physics and EE Ph. D's going to work now that Bell Labs is gone and HP only does product research?
IBM Research is a shadow of what it once was. I happened to be up at IBM's Almaden Research Center [ibm.com] the day IBM exited the disk drive business. It was not a happy day.
"tech behind social security" (Score:2)
Thanks Mostly to Its Employees! (Score:2)
Re:Outsourced (Score:5, Funny)
What do they even make anymore?
About a $100 billion a year.
not saying outsourcing doesn't hurt Americans... (Score:2)
I have a deal for you. (Score:2)
IBM can remain in the US with only US workers as long as it only sells stuff to US clients and nobody else.
What do you say?
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Re:IBM = Innovator? Not in my lifetime. (Score:5, Informative)
You seem to be confusing 'hype' with 'innovation' if you think it was led by Microsoft and Apple. There is a reason that there were basically 2 PC architectures - Apple, and (wait for it) 'IBM PC Compatible'. One of those completely swamped the other.
You might want to check out whose systems are behind almost any financial transaction you process. At the other end of the scale, you might want to check out whose processors are in every XBox/360, PS/3, and Wii.
Maybe you have a GPS - want to take a guess on whose semiconductor (SiGe) technology is in there?
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It's even better now that even Apple has switched over to the 'IBM PC Compatible' architecture.
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Architecture != chip. Neither OS9 nor OSX are pc-compatible in any way, shape, size or form. Architecture by definition cannot be exclusive of OS, libraries, kernel.
Re:IBM = Innovator? Not in my lifetime. (Score:4, Insightful)
'There is a reason...' is something of a historical mess of a sentence. At the release of 8088-based IBM computers, one could still buy Apples (6502, not macs), trs-80's, commodore systems, atari, several 8080 and z80 systems/OS's (mostly CP/M), international alternatives (Acorns, Sinclairs), and niche business systems (wasn't OS-9 out by this time?). Apologies to fellow oldsters for not digging up a comprehensive list or missing your pet system -- many more existed when the IBM PC was released.
Skip ahead a few years, and there were newer commodores, apples, ataris, other brands and various Radio Shack schlockery. There'd also been all sorts of changes on OS's, all sorts of changes under the hood. By then, there was a burgeoning PC-compatible market... and it was beginning to be clear that 'PC-compatible' was going to dominate the future. But the category didn't exist initially, and pretending that it was ever an apple/ibm/microsoft triumvirate is just silly.
Having said that, around this time (1977-1985) nobody seriously considered IBM innovative. Their dominant strength was in delivering stodgy b-side computational function that companies could rationalize buying. Any innovation seen pc-side sprang to life as a 3rd-party product. After a few years, IBM might deign to make their own version.
During their existence, Apple deservedly gets credit for innovation, even if part of their genius has been recognizing underappreciated good ideas and pushing them (xerox parc, etc.).
Through all of this, many other companies should get credit for innovation in networks, printing, software (visicalc, sidekick, turbo * compilers), modems, displays, input, storage, etc.
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What are you smoking? IBM invented the term PC. When I was growing up (also 30ish), computers were either "IBM compatible", or an Apple. Floppy disks were "IBM format". Hell, I still know people that refer to a non-Mac PC as "an IBM". IBM is synonymous with the PC revolution where I'm from (the US), but maybe it's different where you're from.
I have posted on this thread several times defending IBMs still admirable record of genuine innovation, but the "IBM compatible" desktop (now known as the Wintel platform) isn't it. The name "Wintel" tells the story - somebody else's OS and somebody else's processor in a decent-but-not-ground-breaking systems package. The dominance of the IBM compatible was simply a case of the power of market dominance - it was IBM so businesses bought it. Microsoft went on to replicate this model in the 1990s - the market
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GET THE FUCK OFF MY LAWN. (Score:2)
When the PC first came out it was an IBM.
I'm pretty sure I recall other companies selling Personal Computers before IBM even go into the market.
Lots of them named for fruit (really, WTF?...) for some reason, Pineapple, Apricot, Kumquat, Orange....
And I'm sure that Tandy, Texas Instruments, Commodore, Atari, Franklin, among a myriad of others would dispute your ill-informed claim.
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Filing patents is not innovating. (Score:2)
It is gaming the broken patent registration system.