This day in history - June 16

[seamusTX]

1858 - Abraham Lincoln, accepting the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate, said, "a house divided against itself cannot stand."

1909 - The first commercially manufactured U.S. airplane was sold by Glenn Curtiss.

1963 - The first woman space traveler, Valentina Tereshkova, was launched into orbit aboard Vostok 6.

1987 - Bernhard Goetz was found not guilty of attempted murder in the shooting of four men that he said were going to rob him in the New York City subway. He was convicted of illegal weapons possession.

Later he was sued for all he was worth.

- Jim

[seamusTX]

1911 - The company that became IBM was founded.

Originally called the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, it was formed from the merger of three companies that manufactured clocks, scales, and Hollerith tabulating equipment.

Hollerith cards were the famous "punch cards" that had been in use for about 20 years at that time. They were the only automated method of tabulating and sorting data until digital computers were developed in the 1940s. Hollerith cards became obsolete in the 1990s.

http://www.ibm.com/ibm100/us/en/icons/founded/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Fewer than 500 U.S.-based companies have been in continuous operation for more than a century.

- Jim

[chasfm11]

1911 - The company that became IBM was founded.

Originally called the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, it was formed from the merger of three companies that manufactured clocks, scales, and Hollerith tabulating equipment.

Hollerith cards were the famous "punch cards" that had been in use for about 20 years at that time. They were the only automated method of tabulating and sorting data until digital computers were developed in the 1940s. Hollerith cards became obsolete in the 1990s.

http://www.ibm.com/ibm100/us/en/icons/founded/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Fewer than 500 U.S.-based companies have been in continuous operation for more than a century.

- Jim

IBM has been the subject of two major DOJ anti-trust lawsuits during its history. One of those was settled when IBM hired a former US attorney to administer it. There is considerable discussion about the extent to which the Watsons (Thomas Watson and Thomas Watson Jr) were guilty of the charges brought but the lawsuits were enormously expensive for both the Federal government and IBM. There was considerable discussion about IBM being broken up by the government in the same way as AT&T was. The growth in the competitive marketplace in both hardware and software was probably the only thing that prevented that breakup.

Probably the most critical period in IBM's history was the announcement of System/360. Thomas Watson Jr literally bet the company on the success of that product line and it was a disaster when it was delivered to customer locations. Watson pleaded with customers to give IBM time to work out the problems. Watson put TV "Vinnie" Learson (who would later become CEO himself) in charge of the project to fix the 360 product line. It was a case of a "too big to fail" company pulling itself out of the hole that it had dug for itself. If Learson had not managed the re-engineering of System 360, IBM would likely not have survived and there would be no 100 year anniversary.

[seamusTX]

Even if the feds had broken up IBM, some significant piece of the company would have continued to be called IBM, just as happened with AT&T.

IBM rarely was a technological innovator or for that matter a well-managed company. It was the subject of rumors of market manipulation and shady business practices as far back as I can remember.

In fact, just yesterday the former speaker of the house of Massachusetts was found guilty in a kickback deal involving a crooked salesman from a division of IBM. However, the company as a whole escaped penalties.

In spite of that, IBM somehow had an aura of competence and invincibility in the minds of the public.

It did survive, while some of its competitors that logically should have done better did not. DEC, for example, was eating IBM's lunch for a while. It is now completely gone. Xerox was more innovative, but never made market headway outside the field of photocopiers.

- Jim

[ELB]

My first Air Force assignment was as a programmer for a weapons system that originally started with the System 360, but was using the System 370 by the time I arrived. This was the Airborne Warning and Control System, the E-3A (then B & C) Sentry. The computer on the aircraft was called a "4Pi" but it basically was a 360/370 computer packaged in a special way. The earliest models used genuine "core" memory (wire-wrapped magnets), and all thru the period I worked with AWACS (82-91) it used drum memory and 800 bpi tapes for mass storage.

Being that the 4Pi was an airborne 370, the software produced on the ground support 370 systems ported directly to it, and vice versa. Most AWACS code was written in JOVIAL, with some forays into 370 Assembler language (which is one step removed from working directly in 1's and 0's), which necessitated that the programmer have a pretty detailed knowledge of how the 370 architecture worked. JOVIAL was pretty interesting, it allowed one to insert Assembler directly into the JOVIAL code, and also allow one to directly manipulate specific word and bits in physical memory. One could create some awesome problems doing this.

The 370 was a pain in the neck to use, tho. The 360/370 series was designed when IBM (Hollerith) punch cards were king, and altho we could enter data thru CRTs by the time I arrived, the whole thing was still formatted around 80 column Hollerith cards. (I did have to use punch cards in college and in Air Force training). Also, the programmer had to tell the 360 EVERYTHING it needed to know about how to run the program: how much core memory (RAM) it would use, how much mass storage, what type of mass storage, how many tracks and bytes of the hard disk would be used, which hard disks would be used, which file number on tape would be used, whether the tape would be 1600 or 800 bits-per-inch, and a whole bunch of other stuff. This was all specified in IBM Job Control Language, or JCL, which was a programming language in and of itself. It was strictly formatted, usually required a bunch of code just to get your main program to run, and if you messed up a single comma, the whole thing would abort and kick your program out of the queue (another hangover from the punchcard-based design -- some times we spent a long time waiting for our program to get to the head of the queue -- and then a JCL error would kill it. grrrrr!!).

So with the IBM machine, the programmer had to know not only the main programming language (like JOVIAL), but also have a very good grasp of all the hardware down to the bit level, the CPU architecture, the tapes and tape drives, the various types of hard drives, and of course, the weapons system we were programming for, including Air Defense concepts, TADIL-A message formats, and so forth. And on top of it all, it was all classified Secret, so there were boocoo rules on how to handle mountains of classified paper and tapes. And no "Windows" or mice to help out -- these was hairy chested cavemen programmers carving their own punch cards out of clay and baking them in our hand-dug ovens. Almost.

But ya know, the whole thing worked pretty well, actually. Expensive and labor intensive, but the AWACS was a pretty amazing piece of work.

[MMac]

On this day in history I was born :-)

[RottenApple]

On this day in history I was born :-)

Happy birthday!

[chasfm11]

It did survive, while some of its competitors that logically should have done better did not.
- Jim

But not without its own share of colossal blunders. Two of the biggest that come to mind (but there were many, many more) were the Personal Computer and SAP. When the Delta airline crash wiped out the entire brain trust of the origin PC Company and their families, IBM turned the operation over to a committee - who built the PC Junior. As the remnants of the PC business were sold off a couple of years ago, Microsoft, who had been a small player in the original PC announced record dividends.

The guys behind SAP wanted to sell their software to IBM, who didn't want to be in the software business refused that offer. Today, SAP is worth 100s of times what that original asking price was and IBM is trying to remake itself into a software company.

[The Mad Moderate]

Tupac Shakur was also born on this date in 1971. Widely regarded as one of the all time greatest rappers.