Happy 100th Birthday - IBM
A big tip of the hat to
Bayou Renaissance Man"
Happy 100th birthday to IBM
On June 16th, 1911, three smaller companies merged to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. In 1924 the C-R-T Co. would change its name to International Business Machines. Its initials, IBM, would go on to become synonymous with the computer industry.
IBM has given us the bar code, the magnetic strip on credit, debit and ATM cards, the high-speed transaction processing system that made ATM's possible, the floppy disk (remember those?), and countless other innovations. Its punch-card technology helped count the US population in the decennial Census. Its computer systems and software helped land astronauts on the Moon. Its mainframe computers and database technology continue to serve large businesses almost everywhere you can think of.
IBM also gave us the industry-standard PC architecture, back in 1981.
If you're reading this on a computer screen, the odds are about 17 to 1 that you're doing so on a personal computer whose architecture still follows what was introduced as the IBM PC.
Was running
CP/M for about five years working on
dBase and
Small C development for clients. My big machine was a
Cromemco S-100 system with two 8" double sided double density floppy disks each good for a whopping 1.2MB storage. I later (for about $1,200) added a five MB hard drive.
Finally succumbed to the dark side and purchased an IBM XT with an expansion box and an after-market Seagate 20MB hard drive. That was about $6K in 1985 real dollars (not today's dollarettes). Switched languages over to
Borland's Turbo Pascal and never really picked up C again. Moved more into Hardware.
I regret selling the Cromemco system -- still have some S-100 boards and would love to find an old IMSAI machine to play with.
I remember getting a US Robotics 9,600 modem and being impressed that the text files were coming in faster than I could read them.
It is a long and a fun ride with zero signs of slowing down...
Posted by DaveH at June 16, 2011 9:06 PM