by Michael Hill and Jordan Robertson
Google, Apple and Facebook get all the attention. But the forgettable everyday tasks of technology — saving a file on your laptop, swiping your ATM card to get 40 bucks, scanning a gallon of milk at the checkout line — that's all IBM.
International Business Machines turns 100 on Thursday without much fanfare. But its much younger competitors owe a lot to Big Blue.
After all, where would Groupon be without the supermarket bar code? Or Google without the mainframe computer?
"They were kind of like a cornerstone of that whole enterprise that has become the heart of the computer industry in the U.S.," says Bob Djurdjevic, a former IBM employee and president of Annex Research.
IBM dates to June 16, 1911, when three companies that made scales, punch-clocks for work and other machines merged to form the Computing Tabulating Recording Co. The modern-day name followed in 1924.
With a plant in Endicott, N.Y., the new business also made cheese slicers and — significantly for its future — machines that read data stored on punch cards. By the 1930s, IBM's cards were keeping track of 26 million Americans for the newly launched Social Security program.
These old, sprawling machines might seem quaint in the iPod era, but they had design elements similar to modern computers. They had places for data storage, math processing areas and output, says David A. Mindell, professor of the history of technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Punch cards carted from station to station represented what business today might call "data flow."
"It was very sophisticated," Mindell says.
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Google, Apple and Facebook get all the attention. But the forgettable everyday tasks of technology — saving a file on your laptop, swiping your ATM card to get 40 bucks, scanning a gallon of milk at the checkout line — that's all IBM.International Business Machines turns 100 on Thursday without much fanfare. But its much younger competitors owe a lot to Big Blue.
After all, where would Groupon be without the supermarket bar code? Or Google without the mainframe computer?
"They were kind of like a cornerstone of that whole enterprise that has become the heart of the computer industry in the U.S.," says Bob Djurdjevic, a former IBM employee and president of Annex Research.
IBM dates to June 16, 1911, when three companies that made scales, punch-clocks for work and other machines merged to form the Computing Tabulating Recording Co. The modern-day name followed in 1924.
With a plant in Endicott, N.Y., the new business also made cheese slicers and — significantly for its future — machines that read data stored on punch cards. By the 1930s, IBM's cards were keeping track of 26 million Americans for the newly launched Social Security program.
These old, sprawling machines might seem quaint in the iPod era, but they had design elements similar to modern computers. They had places for data storage, math processing areas and output, says David A. Mindell, professor of the history of technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Punch cards carted from station to station represented what business today might call "data flow."
"It was very sophisticated," Mindell says.
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