IBM: A Brand Is Not Everything, But It Is Important To Have A Good One
February 19, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If you want to trace the roots of Big Blue back to the beginning, you start with Herman Hollerith at Columbia University and the punch card tabulating machines he created and that were ultimately used in their first big commercial application to do the calculating for the US Census in 1890.
Back then, mainframes were made of wood, copper, and paper, and in 1911, Hollerith’s punch card machine business, known as the Tabulating Machine Co, were united with the Dayton Counter Scales, Dayton Industrial Scales, and International Time Recorder machines that were part and parcel of the Industrial Revolution. The resulting conglomerate was known as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co, or CTR for short, but it wasn’t until Thomas Watson (Sr, not Jr) was brought aboard in 1914 after a 20-year stint at National Cash Register to make some sense of this disparate product line.
A decade later – more precisely, on February 15, 1924, which is a century ago, something that Watson called the International Business Machines Corp was incorporated and a new company was conceived that did not include scales and time clocks.
It took a while for IBM to find itself and its logo, as you can see from the chart above. It took 40 years to go from punch cards to the System/360 mainframe, and it has been nearly 60 years since then and most of the computing that has been done in the past hundred years has been done on machines largely architected by Big Blue and mimicked by others.
This cannot be said for the third wave of Generative AI systems that got their real start a decade ago but which are based on machine learning techniques created back in the 1980s. IBM is not architecting this revolution. Nvidia is. But it remains to be seen if Nvidia will stand the test of time that Big Blue has. And if you want to be generous, the IBM computing platform, in some form or another, has been around for 134 years. It is hard to imagine what computing will look like in April 2127, which will be when Nvidia will be 134 years old.
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