50 years ago today, IBM announced the 1401 Data Processing System. Originally designed as a spooling system for the larger machines, the 1401 became very popular as a mainframe in its own right, eventually being called 'The Model T of Computers'. By the end of 1961, the number of 1401s installed in the United States alone had reached 2,000 - representing about one fourth of all computers installed by all manufacturers at that time. 15- 20,000 were eventually built. The Computer History Museum in Mountain View is having a 50th anniversary celebration on November 10th. Here's what $125,600 (or $2500/month rent) would get you: [more inside]
posted by MtDewd on Oct 4, 2009 - 52 comments

Scientists image single molecule with atomic force microscopy. See the original abstract in Science. CNET reproduces a representation of the experiment.
posted by grouse on Aug 28, 2009 - 43 comments

From the satisfying click of its keys to its no-nonsense layout and solid steel underpinnings, IBM's 24-year-old Model M is the standard by which all other keyboards must be judged. (previously)
posted by Joe Beese on Jun 22, 2009 - 106 comments

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages
posted by Artw on May 8, 2009 - 47 comments

IBM Research is planning on working on taking artificial intelligence beyond master-level Chess (previously), and on to question answering with a computing system that has been in development for the past two years. Named "Watson," after the I.B.M. founder, Thomas J. Watson Sr., the system will challenge human contestants at Jeopardy (previously). Watson's success depends as much on its ability to understand and respond to the subtleties of human language as it does on the extent of its knowledge database. Don't worry, Alex Trebek knows what's in store. (via)
posted by filthy light thief on Apr 27, 2009 - 45 comments

IBM solves the outsourcing problem by firing American employees then offering to re-hire them in India. "The pitch to employees who might consider shifting to IBM's operations in developing economies seems to be the low cost of living, warmer climate and variety in cuisine and exotic places."
posted by billysumday on Feb 6, 2009 - 86 comments

IBM's the next 5 in 5 "forecasts the five innovations that will change the way that we live, work and play in the next five years." [more inside]
posted by dobie on May 19, 2008 - 60 comments

"Third Reich to Fortune 500: Five Popular Brands the Nazis Gave Us." There are pictures and videos of kittens to soften the blow.
posted by beaucoupkevin on Jan 8, 2008 - 57 comments

Some people care about their keyboards. The Northgate OmniKey (now resurrected) was once legendary. There are those who mourn the passing of the space cadet keyboard and its successors, and those who campaign for its revival. The late, lamented (though not by everyone) Apple Extended Keyboard was finally recreated.

But, for the purist, there is only one true keyboard, the best ever made: the IBM Model M. [more inside]
posted by enn on Nov 3, 2007 - 124 comments

It's called the Giant Magnetoresistive effect and it could one day allow electronic devices to hold 10 to 100 times the data in the same amount of space. "That means the iPod that today can hold up to 200 hours of video could store every single TV program broadcast during a week on 120 channels." [nyt]
posted by chuckdarwin on Sep 12, 2007 - 37 comments

As it builds a presence and invests in virtual worlds, IBM is hoping to avoid potentially embarrassing incidents by establishing official guidelines for its more than 5,000 employees who inhabit "Second Life," Entropia Universe," "Forterra," "There" and other virtual worlds. "IBM, whose 20th century employees were parodied as corporate cogs in matching navy suits, doesn't have an avatar dress code. But guidelines suggest being 'especially sensitive to the appropriateness of your avatar or persona's appearance when you are meeting with IBM clients or conducting IBM business.'" Other directives: "Don't discuss intellectual property with unauthorized people." "Don't discriminate or harass" and by all means, "Be a good 3D Netizen."
posted by ericb on Jul 26, 2007 - 9 comments

Is anyone really surprised to hear that our happy little friends at SCO just got a a delisting notice from Nasdaq? If you own SCO stock, this might be a good time to look at a timeshare instead. (winky winky) (via)
posted by metasonix on Apr 28, 2007 - 49 comments

"The church of global free trade, which rules American politics with infallible pretensions, may have finally met its Martin Luther." A thorough summary in The Nation of the brilliant but ignored Global Trade and Conflicting National Interests by Ralph Gomory, former IBM Senior Vice President for Science and winner of the National Medal of Science. His heresy? Arguing, with supporting technical and economic data, that multinational corporations and their home countries have divergent interests in shipping skilled labor and advanced technologies overseas, and that this "divergence" is a net negative for the American economy and the American public. Globalization, he argues, has its losers, the United States paramount among them.
posted by Pastabagel on Apr 20, 2007 - 76 comments

IBM Research and Technical Journals. Complete recent issues of IBM Research and Development Journal and Systems Journal as well as searchable archives.
posted by Burhanistan on Mar 6, 2007 - 9 comments

"In 1964, a computer - the IBM 1401 Data Processing System - arrived in Iceland, one of the very first computers to be imported into the country… The chief maintenance engineer for this machine was Jóhann Gunnarsson, my father. A keen musician, he learned of an obscure method of making music on this computer - a purpose for which this business machine was not at all designed… When the IBM 1401 was taken out of service in 1971, it wasn't simply thrown away like an old refrigerator, but was given a little farewell ceremony, almost a funeral, when its melodies were played for one last time. This "performance" was documented on tape along with recordings of the sound of the machine in operation." The whole story with samples, pictures and video at Jóhann Jóhannsson's site. [via]
posted by tellurian on Feb 26, 2007 - 15 comments

Microsoft has been caught paying for Wikipedia edits. But wasn't this inevitable? Now that Wikipedia has become the de facto online reference, wasn't it inevitable that it would attract governments, corporates and other groups to create their own version of events. Is this an inherent and fatal flaw in open source knowledge?
posted by bobbyelliott on Jan 24, 2007 - 52 comments

The world is not flat Like open source/content? Like youtube? You have a choice. According to IBM, the future is open, and according to Linux, this future is inevitable.
posted by localhuman on Dec 30, 2006 - 41 comments

Ballmer: Linux Users Owe Microsoft. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer stated at the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) conference in Seattle yesterday, that Linux infringes upon his company's intellectual property. Does this signal preparations for all out war against the open source community? Microsoft's recent acquisition of Novell was seen as an ominous sign. Or perhaps it's a sign that user friendly versions of linux such as Ubuntu threaten sales of Microsoft's problematic new VISTA OS, scheduled for release Nov. 30th for businesses and Jan. 30, 2007 for consumers?
posted by Skygazer on Nov 17, 2006 - 79 comments

IBM is laying off people in Burlington, Endicott, Rochester and Austin today. The presumptive reason is Indian outsourcing — some employees have posted that they were asked to train their replacements. Why hasn't this made the news?
posted by ubiquity on Sep 8, 2006 - 70 comments

IBM raises lowers the bar. Apparently 1.5 nanometers is all that is needed for a 0 or a 1. This advance in data storage technology is a ways off from making an impact in chip construction, but allows for storage that is 1/8 the size of CMOS's wildest dreams. Neat. via ZDNet
posted by Addiction on Aug 14, 2006 - 14 comments

The Information Machine, [YouTube]. This short animated film was written, produced and directed by Charles and Ray Eames for the IBM Pavillion at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair [embedded sound]. Animation by Dolores Cannata. The topic is the computer in the context of human development.
posted by nickyskye on Jul 1, 2006 - 7 comments

Blue Gene bears Blue Brain beats Deep Blue. Dr. Henry Markram answers questions in the FAQ. Neurons are beautiful. Blue Gene/L is now the fastest supercomputer in the world. IBM Research rocks. Deep Blue beat Kasparov almost a decade ago. Feeling Blue?
posted by reflection on Jan 29, 2006 - 10 comments

Ponder This. 'You are cordially invited to match wits with some of the best minds in IBM Research.' Monthly puzzles, with solutions, going back to 1998.
posted by plep on Mar 7, 2005 - 12 comments

IBM to give away 500 patents. Curiouser and curiouser. Why now? And, what patents? IBM makes a great deal of money licensing their patent portfolio - is this meant to stimulate additional licensing? How does this fit in with the open source movement? In other news, IBM just received the go-ahead to sell off their PC unit to a firm that just won a rather large contract to provide PCs in China.
posted by FormlessOne on Jan 11, 2005 - 18 comments

The end of an era confirmed. IBM sells its PC business to China's Lenovo. Is a future Apple partnership in the works?
posted by xammerboy on Dec 7, 2004 - 16 comments

End of an era IBM may sell its PC division to Lenovo, a Chinese company, due to its decade-long dwindling importance in comparison to powerhouses HP and Dell - in a market they helped invent in the first place. Seems like a good enough reason to reminisce about the old bastard.
posted by fungible on Dec 3, 2004 - 21 comments

Copy your iPod contents to your PC! Mac users have been swearing by such products as iPodRip or iPod Access but now we in the majority can "backup" our tunes from our lil device onto our ibm-compatibles. take that shelbyville!
posted by tsarfan on Nov 15, 2004 - 23 comments

A history of the IBM Typewriter. When in high school (ca. 1993), a room full of these was replaced with a room full of 286s.
posted by pieoverdone on Jun 8, 2004 - 12 comments

A result of three years of cooperation between I.B.M. and Egypt's government and major museums, the country's considerable museum collections were digitized and loaded onto www.eternalegypt.org - Thousands more artifacts are to be added over time. I.B.M. expects the concept and the scanning and database technologies developed for the project to be applied at other museums and cultural collections worldwide.
posted by stbalbach on Mar 3, 2004 - 6 comments

Electronic music buffs cite Radiohead's Kid A as their best work. How many know that Idioteque, arguably the stand-out track owes a debt to Paul Lansky, sampling as it does Lansky's Mild Und Leise [mp3 file], a track composed in 1973 on an IBM 360/91 mainframe. I didn't. Should you find your interest piqued, you might want to read an interview with Lansky. If that was then, this is now: The excellent music video to Zeal [Quicktime] by Plaid, which, although a very different beast, is an excellent indicator of how far electronic music has come. [Probably NSFW].
posted by nthdegx on Feb 9, 2004 - 42 comments

IBM serves download of new Linux ad. IBM launched a TV ad this week featuring a nine-year-old boy named Linux. To their credit, they have enabled some computer users the ability to watch the ad as a download. Strangely, though, they don't make it easy to watch the spot on a Linux box. There's plenty of support for Closed Source operating systems and apps, but don't expect to view it with the popular Open Source movie viewer, xine.
posted by tbc on Sep 8, 2003 - 33 comments

Take your hands off the GPL and back away from the keyboard... New twist in the SCO vs. IBM and the rest of the known computing universe: it appears SCO's primary argument in their case will in fact be that the GPL is invalid, trumped by US federal copyright law. (Quote redirect from via Inquirer from Wall Street Journal). And apparently, I'm not alone in beginning to think there's merit to the "Microsoft's behind all this!" conspiracy theories, since these "coincidences" are really starting to pile up...
posted by JollyWanker on Aug 16, 2003 - 29 comments

The IBM 1403 Printer (1964) playing music. This may change your life.
posted by the fire you left me on Feb 4, 2003 - 23 comments

What is Bagotronics? "At Bagotronics we are IN business FOR business. Our scientists, engineers and designers work to develop the innovations that fuel the e-business engine that drives America's economy."

Entertained by an (unfortunately not reproduced on the website) full page ad in the SJ Mercury News, promising a time machine and including an apology to old H.G., I wondered what was up. The ads, the website, all say to stay tuned until Thursday for details, but I'm not really that patient. But quick searches of MeFi, /., and Google turned up nothing, so I swerved over to my favorite lookup service and found that this is simply an advertising comeon, with the site owned by humongous advertising agency Ogilvy & Mathers.
posted by billsaysthis on Oct 29, 2002 - 9 comments

"If you like surfing the web, it is probably because you believe people are basically good." That's the Economist interpreting the results of a recent study by IBM researchers of how cultural characteristics apparently affect people's readiness to adopt new communications technologies.
posted by mattpfeff on Oct 8, 2002 - 19 comments

Introducing Monday? Apparently not. PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting, whose grand plan to change their company name to Monday were previously discussed, came to their senses and sold themselves to IBM. Goodbye new "identity". Goodbye IPO as well. They were planning on spending $110 million to promote the new name -- wonder how much of that went down the toilet?
posted by smackfu on Jul 30, 2002 - 20 comments

Ease of Use? IBM sends mixed message... see how complicated the instructions are to order this poster.
posted by TNLNYC on Jun 20, 2002 - 15 comments

Future Development for Sony and the PSX2 and PSX3. Now that the Game Developers Conference is over what do you think of the plans for the PSX3? It may even have an IBM architecture underneath.
posted by AsiaInsider on Mar 24, 2002 - 7 comments

IBM gives Moore's Law a punch in the face by developing a 110GHz silicon germanium microchip. Only for use in ultra hi-tech environments right now (network infrastructure, military, etc.), of course. What other things could these processors be useful for? Finding vaccines? Genome mapping? SETI? And how many years before they're mass-producible and inexpensive enough for consumer use?
posted by andnbsp on Feb 28, 2002 - 11 comments

IBM gets the bill for less-than-standard advertising methods supporting Linux. The city of San Francisco yesterday quashed some of the warm, fuzzy feelings associated with the Linux operating system when it reached a settlement with IBM that calls for the vendor to pay $120,000 to compensate the city for damages caused by a "guerrilla" marketing campaign centered on Linux.
posted by trioperative on Nov 29, 2001 - 15 comments

U.S. Patent 6,304,886, from the fine folks at IBM. "The tool comprises a plurality of pre-stored templates, comprising HTML formatting code, text, fields and formulas." (Via Scripting News.)
posted by mrbula on Oct 17, 2001 - 6 comments

No more Muzak™ and classic rock? "The [IBM] interns collaborated on something called Hold Freedom, a way to ease the tedium of being on hold while waiting to talk to a human. The program enables callers placed on hold to listen to news, music of their choice, enter a chat group with other customers or even make another phone call without losing their place in the queue. The choices would be based on personal profiles that the customers had previously completed on the call center to phone company's Web site." (Also cool that the idea comes from summer interns.)
posted by tippiedog on Aug 27, 2001 - 9 comments

Proxicom bought by Compaq, last week's purchase of Mainspring by IBM, the dissolution of MarchFirst, and the not-so-slow slide of Viant, Scient, iXL and the rest ... is there any future for the independent style of "e-consultancies" which seemed poised to revolutionize the business world only a couple of years ago?
posted by MattD on Apr 27, 2001 - 10 comments

Big Blue moves into the web services arena, claiming to be the first company to provide such services. Ever hear of .NET? Seems to me that they've been rolling a framework (that's got BETA development tools already) since last summer.

i think the most poignant point in this article isn't the fact that IBM's making false claims, but this quote by Peter O'Kelly:

``It's amazing that these guys are agreeing to work with the same standards. They've finally realized it's a disservice to customers when they try and compete on the basis of proprietary formats and protocols."

Now if the browser wars could end, we'd all be in better shape.
posted by tatochip on Mar 14, 2001 - 5 comments

Playstation 3 chip to be designed by IBM. The three companies (Sony, IBM, and Toshiba) aim to design a "super-computer on a chip" with a wide variety of consumer applications, they said in a joint statement.

"The result will be consumer devices that are more powerful than IBM's Deep Blue super-computer, operate at low power and access the broadband internet at ultra-high speeds," the statement added

Wowzers!
posted by zeoslap on Mar 12, 2001 - 22 comments

And you thought Microsoft was evil. There appears to be pretty significant evidence that IBM was involved in automating the persecution of Jews by the Nazis. Read more about it here, here and here.

And since we haven't even settled the question of when a nation has atoned for its sins, what exactly is the statute of limitations for a company's sins?
posted by anildash on Feb 11, 2001 - 20 comments

IBM, with the latest attempt to put the genie back in the bottle. Their fatal flaw is betting on a post-napster world, though I bet their EMMS technology gets cracked before that ever happens.
posted by mathowie on Jan 22, 2001 - 11 comments

IBM to spend $1 billion on Linux in 2001 Look for OS/3 to hit store shelves by 4Q 2001...
posted by Brilliantcrank on Dec 12, 2000 - 0 comments

Lynn Conway is one of the major talents in the history of the development of computers, responsible for major advances without which computers we buy now would be much different. She's also a transsexual, born physically male. While working for IBM she had her sex-change operation, and IBM immediately fired her for it.
posted by Steven Den Beste on Dec 10, 2000 - 7 comments

Steal a design, win an award. Sumerset Custom Houseboats won several awards in the 2000 Inc. Magazine Web Awards 2000, including the top prize in the General Excellence category. According to a company press release, the site was chosen for its "simple, functional, yet elegant design". The only problem is, they stole the design from IBM's site.
posted by jkottke on Nov 22, 2000 - 33 comments