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At the beginning of the 1960s, several Western European computer firms faced financial issues and pressure from U.S. competitors. A series of negotiations attempted to create a consortium of European manufacturers, and while some of these had a positive outcome, in general they did not succeed; by 1964 IBM had more than a 60% share of the European computer market and General Electric acquired two of the most prominent companies in Europe. This case study examines negotiations during the years 1962–1964, focusing on contacts between U.K. manufacturers English Electric, LEO Computers, and ICT, and Italian Olivetti, French Bull, and German Siemens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to shed light on notable aspects of the history of computing in Greece, starting from 1920. We cover six areas, including the early days of computing in the country, the transition to the Internet era, the formation of a computer-related educational infrastructure, the evolution of data networks, and the growth of the software and hardware industry. In each area we highlight findings that involve the important role of women in this technological evolution, how the risks taken by particular individuals pushed the boundaries of the field, the slow pace of the universities at the early stages, and the key part of multinational technology companies and state-controlled banks. Apart from numerous reports and publications, our sources also include interviews with individuals who played a major part in the development of computing in Greece. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines corporate labor and gender relations in transatlantic perspective. It argues that the gendered communication of IBM’s Thomas Watson Sr. shaped labor relations in his company’s West German subsidiary. In the United States, Watson acted as a business progressive, expanding internationally, opening professional careers to young women, and implementing welfare capitalist measures. When IBM took tighter control of its foreign operations after World War II, Watson sought to implement welfare capitalist measures in the subsidiaries abroad. His wife Jeanette by his side, he presented himself as the caring “pater familias.” German IBM employees embraced Watson’s conservative rhetoric of the IBM family but continued to join national unions and formed a works council, thwarting the major welfare capitalist goal of averting labor organization. Against such local labor practices, gendered communication undergirded a loyal workforce even in critical situations, an overlooked factor contributing to the company’s success. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The origin and history of Landauer's principle is traced through the development of the thermodynamics of computation at IBM from 1959 to 1982. This development was characterized by multiple conceptual shifts: memory came to be seen not as information storage, but as delayed information transmission; information itself was seen not as a disembodied logical entity, but as participating in the physical world; and logical irreversibility was connected with physical, thermodynamic, irreversibility. These conceptual shifts were characterized by an ambivalence opposing strong metaphysical claims to practical considerations. Three sorts of practical considerations are discussed. First, these conceptual shifts engaged materials central to IBM's business practice. Second, arguments for metaphysical certainties were made with reference to the practical functioning of typical computers. Third, arguments for metaphysical certainties were made in the context of establishing the thermodynamics of information as a sub-discipline of physics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

These reminiscences relate to the period that Brian Randell spent between 1964 and 1966 first at IBM Research working on Project Y and then in the IBM Systems Development Division on the resulting ACS Project--then-secret projects that aimed to build a supercomputer that would be 100 times faster than Stretch. Randell's account is based in part on his memory, but also makes extensive use of the small set of files that he had retained, mainly relating to patent applications. A scanned copy of one of these files, the paper "Dynamic Instruction Scheduling," that he coauthored with Lynn Conway, Don Rozenberg, and Don Senzig in February 1966, is available as an online Web extra https://s3.amazonaws.com/ieeecs.cdn.csdl.public/mags/an/2015/03/man2015030055s.pdf and in Newcastle University's online archive at www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/publications/trs/papers/891.pdf. Because of space constraints just the initial three pages of this paper are included in the present article, which also includes the text from a section on "Interrupts" that was added to the 1969 IBM San Jose Technical Report version of the 1966 paper. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Academically trained as a historian and then hired as an IBM salesperson in the 1970s, James Cortada spent many years working to define the scope of the emerging history of computing field. As an IBM employee, Cortada began his writing career with almost exclusive access to the IBM Archives. This article describes his experiences with the IBM Archives, the archives of other major industry leaders (such as Burroughs and NCR), and the still active pioneers in the computer industry during this period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This Events & Sightings installment covers a range of recent events focusing on the history of computing. Mai Sugimoto recaps the "Making the History of Computing Relevant" conference held at the Science Museum in South Kensington, London, in June 2013. David Walden provides an update on IEEE Computer Society History Committee activities, including the re-release of J.A.N. Lee's classic book Computer Pioneers. Dag Spicer also reviews activities and developments at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, over the last year. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Comparisons between the early British and US computer industries invariably have focused on the differential development of the British Tabulating Machine Company (BTM) and IBM. In this article, the author seeks to refocus examination of BTM (and comparisons of it to IBM) within the context of an American competitor somewhat similar in size, customer base, and organizational capabilities in electronics to BTM: Burroughs Corporation. The cases of BTM and Burroughs demonstrate the complexity of coordinating international R&D joint ventures, the struggle to create advanced products in an emerging technology while preserving existing revenue streams, and the cultural and technical hurdles involved in assimilating R&D resources from acquisitions in a rapidly changing technologically based industry. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Until about 1970, programming languages and their compilers were perhaps the most active system software area. Because of its technical position at that time, IBM made significant contributions to this field. This retrospective concentrates on two languages, Algol 60 and PL/I, because with them compiler development reached an historical peak within IBM's European laboratories. The Boeblingen, Hursley, and La Gaude labs were involved in compiler projects for a period of 10 to 15 years. This article considers the development of programming in general, the author's experience, and the responsibility of the different laboratories. As a consequence of IBM's "unbundling"' decision in 1969, programming language activity within IBM's European laboratories decreased considerably, and other software activities were initiated. Some of the lessons learned at that time are still useful today. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the golden age of mainframes (1960-1975) one of the foremost issues facing mainframe computer firms was manufacturing - despite this fact, system design has received nearly all the attention of scholars to date. The greatest manufacturing concern of these mainframe producers was component technology: the selection and provision of memory, especially main memory. As this period progressed, semiconductor memory was coming to dominance. Increasingly, firms' performance in the expanding market for mainframes pivoted on their memory component decisions. International Business Machines (IBM) had become the dominant mainframe producer, and its particular response to the semiconductor memory challenge has taken the role as the default or natural position. A comparison of IBM's experience with that of their fiercest mainframe rival during this period, Sperry Univac, highlights the centrality of memory components to the overall mainframe business as well as the highly contingent and path-dependent nature of the particular semiconductor policies and practices adopted by firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

France, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union implemented various public policies designed to promote the development of local computer industries, beginning in the late 1940s, that had mixed results but were part of a larger pan-European interest in promoting national economic development through the use of technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the comparison of different market outcomes of International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) and Remington Rand Inc., two leading computer manufacturers in the U.S that both exhibit an engineering expansion after the World War II. It examines how the companies overcome, resist and adjusted to different market conditions and why IBM had succeeded more than others. Furthermore, growth strategies, managerial competence and corporate culture, and corporate organization are some of the factors that differentiated the two companies. It also argues that relationships with foreign governments and stakeholders through European-wide manufacturing system and European research laboratories are being proficiently managed by IBM.

The article focuses on the marketing of personal computer word processing software and discusses the pattern which was established to dominate a popular product in the market. It describes the evolution of the word processing industry and how it had brought changes in its target user, the organization of work in business, and in the culture which are mostly brought about by the widespread use of personal computers. Furthermore, it mentions the existing competition between computer industries such as Microsoft Corp. and International Business Machines Corp. in developing updated operating systems.

We investigate the maximum increase in number of phrases that results from changing k consecutive symbols in a string x having length n parsed using an LZ'77-like algorithm. We consider a class of compression algorithms that partition a sequence into a collection y of nonoverlapping, variable-length phrases and encode them. Each phrase either is a singleton or matches a substring that starts to its left. We show that changing a single symbol of x in position i can yield an expansion that is of order O(n - i)2/3 as (n - i) → ∞. Our lower bound requires an alphabet size of O(n - i)1/3. We also show that changing k consecutive symbols starting from position i can yield an expansion having a similar but somewhat more involved form. The paper contains both analytically derived upper and lower bounds, and algorithms for numerically computing tighter bounds. While deriving the bounds, we provide a detailed analysis of how expansion can arise when changing consecutive symbols. This problem is motivated by management policies for computer systems, such as the IBM Memory eXpansion Technology (MXT) or the IBM iSeries compressed disks, that use LZ'77-like coding on small compression units, such as 1-4 kbyte, and store the compressed data in memory or on disk tracks. Here, when a change of a portion of the compression unit occurs, for example, an L2 cache line, or a 512-byte disk sector, the data is recompressed and potentially stored in a different location. Knowing the maximum expansion, rather than the average expansion, is an important factor for designing policies for allocation and management of memory or disk space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the computer software industry between 1960 and 1979. Software is not a new or unique concept; it is merely a structured way of describing a process. Similarly, as software is the description of a process--indeed, it is a precise enough description to actually drive the process--protections available to unique, non-obvious processes (like patents) should be available to software. In retrospect, the foregoing seems clear and obvious. The Association of Data Processing Service Organizations (ADAPSO) did not have any real presence in software until 1971 when it absorbed a small group of software product companies that had been organized under the name Software Industry Association. Jerry Dreyer, then ADAPSO's executive director, was anxious to move into software, and he created a sectional structure that let the data center people have their space while the software professionals had theirs. In 1972, another software group, the Association of Independent Software Companies, joined too. Once incorporated into the ADAPSO, software professionals gradually increased their power and representation. By the mid-1970s, the ADAPSO was ready to back the software section and take on International Business Machines Corp.

This paper describes the evolution of the Jikes™ Research Virtual Machine project from an IBM internal research project, called Jalapeño, into an open-source project. After summarizing the original goals of the project, we discuss the motivation for releasing it as an open-source project and the activities performed to ensure the success of the project. Throughout, we highlight the unique challenges of developing and maintaining an open-source project designed specifically to support a research community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article begins a three-part series, presenting an overview of events in International Business Machines (IBM) Corp. that preceded today's versatility in handling Far Eastern languages in the information technology arena. Here, Part 1 analyzes the complexities and characteristics of the Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Thai, and other Far Eastern languages in the context of 1960's technologies and early IT products that emerged. Today, millions of people in China, Japan, Korea, and Thailand keep Internet and e-mail humming. They take it for granted that the system they are using came about automatically, along with the invention of the computer. Although the IBM 1401 Data Processing System in 1960 had soon become a bestseller in the western world, the implementation of national language requirements in East Asia was mandatory if the domestic market potential of non-English-speaking countries was to be fully exploited. This need was especially pronounced in Japan. During 1961, IBM Japan was trying to coordinate the development of a Katakana feature for the IBM 1401 in collaboration with the Product Development Laboratory of IBM Germany.

The German laboratory of International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) in Boeblingen, founded in 1953, was initially oriented toward research and exploratory development. It turned to full product development capabilities between 1960 and 1964. This article touches on the interactive driving forces of evolving technologies, market opportunities, company policies, and the vision and creativity of many individuals. In this article, the multiple functions needed for building a development laboratory from scratch in the then-new field of computer electronics have been described. The efforts ranged from assembling appropriate engineering and scientific competence to defining a development program that would make a meaningful contribution to IBM's product line. It has also been explained that how it became possible, with nothing to go by historically, in smoothly integrating this product development operation with IBM's overall research and development operations. In view of electronics and computers evolving after 1948, IBM encouraged its major European subsidiaries to build up physics and electronics competences. Thus, IBM Germany started to look for people in those respective disciplines.

This article profiles Robert B. Forest, who edited the periodical "Datamation," during its spectacular heyday in the 1960s. When the author first met Bob Forest not long after he became editor in April 1963, the circumstances were less than congenial. The author had just left the information technology firm IBM Corp., to become vice president in charge of systems planning at Security First National Bank in Los Angeles, California and was astonished to open a copy of the periodical and discover material from the upcoming book in a feature article attributed to Norman Ream, then assistant controller of Lockheed Corp. Forest and the author reconstructed the circumstances leading to the plagiarism of the author's book material. During his last year at IBM, the author was on the faculty of the IBM Systems Research Institute and taught a course in system development. Almost everyone in the computer field during the 1960s and 1970s--especially those in the vendor community--viewed the periodical "Datamation," as "must" reading.

Reports on trends in the computer industry as of February 2004. Key features of IBM's 2-Gigahertz PowerPC 970 G5 processor; IBM's introduction of a small, high performance prototype machine, Blue Gene/L, that uses relatively little energy. INSETS: IBM's Energy-Efficient Supercomputer.;Cray's Supercomputer for the Corporate Masses..

This paper provides the author's personal views and perspectives on software process improvement. Starting with his first work on technology assessment in IBM over 20 years ago, Watts Humphrey describes the process improvement work he has been directly involved in. This includes the development of the early process assessment methods, the original design of the CMM, and the introduction of the Personal Software Process (PSP)SM and Team Software Process (TSP)SM*. In addition to describing the original motivation for this work, the author also reviews many of the problems he and his associates encountered and why they solved them the way they did. He also comments on the outstanding issues and likely directions for future work. Finally, this work has built on the experiences and contributions of many people. Mr. Humphrey only describes work that he was personally involved in and he names many of the key contributors. However, so many people have been involved in this work that a full list of the important participants would be impractical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides information on the IBM eServer z900 design. Description of the electronic package; Analysis of the power and delivery subsystem; Features of the cooling and mechanical support infrastructure.

Describes the evolution of computer applications from 1949 to 2001. Original method of programming ENIAC, the world's first electronic computer; Information on the first computer used at IBM; Overview of the Computer Usage Company.

Examines the changes in the production and consumption of computers in workplaces. Criticisms on the computing history; Exploration on the archive of computer manufacturer; Introduction of the International Business Machine Personal Computer.

Presents the House for the History of International Business Machine (IBM) Data Processing in Sindelfingen, Germany. How the House began; Main attractions of the show; Information on the transistor age and IBM's efforts in electronic data processing shows in the show.

Theories of dependency and development contain several deficiencies which limit their effectiveness for the study of core/core relations. Similarly, frameworks allowing for a study of intra-core relations have not adequately specified the relationship between international and national factors, or their combined effects, in generating inequities between core countries. This case study offers some preliminary observations about the relationship between internationalization of production and national economic planning efforts. The study highlights several points concerning the matrix of international and national political-economic factors, and focuses on particular patterns resulting from the configuration of these factors in the case of the British computer industry and International Business Machines (IBM). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]