received a unified and stylish industrial design language, but also to documentation, public exhibits, and architecture. IBM hired Charles and Ray
Eames, probably best remembered today for their iconic chairs, to produce
one of the earliest exhibits on the history of computing. Its landmark buildings, which hoisted the firm’s logo like
a flag in the leading cities of the free
world, were designed by star architects
such as Mies van der Rohe.
IBM’s greatness also rested on its
commitment to science. For its research headquarters, in Yorktown
Heights, IBM turned to industrial architect Eero Saarinen, responsible for
such futuristically iconic structures
as the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and
the TWA terminal at JFK airport. The
lab curves in an oval shape, glowing
in the dark like a flying saucer. Into
the 1950s IBM retained a hands-on,
product-centered engineering culture, long after Bell Labs and General
Electric hired scientists and built up
centralized research and development centers. By the 1960s, however,
its international network of research
facilities set the standard for corporate commitment to research. Its
researchers, envisioned by Saarinen
as “tweedy pipe-smoking men,” enjoyed the enviable conjunction of
university-like research facilities with
IBM’s generous pay and benefits and
freedom from teaching duties. The
firm’s Nobel prizes came from basic
research into fields such as superconductivity and electron microscopy.
IBM’s willingness to fund basic science reflected the many possibilities
for payback across the huge range of
products it developed and manufactured, from semiconductors and core
memories to disk drives, keyboards,
punched cards, printers, and dictating machines.
Threats to Greatness
The most successful computing firms
of the 1970s and early-1980s targeted
niche markets where IBM’s core ar-
chitecture did not compete well. DEC
established a huge new market for
minicomputers, SDC and Cray target-
ed supercomputers, while Wang built
a thriving business around word pro-
cessing and office automation. IBM
offered credible projects in most of
ful of products and services that domi-
nate their respective niches. Backward
compatibility is more important than
innovation, as Microsoft showed when
turning Windows and Office products
into lucrative monopolies. Most tech
firms develop a platform as startups
and grow it steadily over many years,
defending it against threats from up-
start competitors.
By the 1970s IBM held a similarly
dominant position in the business-oriented mainframe market, but only
because it launched a massive research and development effort during
the early 1960s. In April 1964 when
IBM introduced its System/360 range
it rendered its entire installed product base obsolete. Two years earlier
IBM had reportedly budgeted $5 billion to develop the new range, twice
its entire annual revenue. According
to Watson Jr. the actual costs were so
high that in 1965 the firm unexpectedly found itself just “a few weeks” from
needing “emergency loans to meet the
payroll.” (See “Father, Son & Co” in the
Further Reading section.)
Before this IBM offered several
incompatible ranges of computers
for different markets and sizes of
company. Customers increasingly expected to receive bundled with their
machines an extensive collection of
systems software packages, such as
programming languages and operating systems. The cost of developing
these tools across so many different
platforms was rising. Incompatibility also threatened customer loyalty.
Computers became obsolete every
few years, but successful application
programs could evolve over decades
of use. Any computer upgrade that
required customers to recode their
applications was a chance for IBM’s
competitors to steal an account away,
particularly as the newly introduced
COBOL language was intended to
let users move applications between
computers from different vendors.
It was this project that introduced
the phrase “computer architecture,”
to describe design features at a more
abstract level than their implementation in a specific computer model.
System/360 imposed a common ma-
chine instruction set, word length,
character set, and peripheral inter-
face over an industry-spanning range
of machines. For example, smaller
machines implemented in micro-
code instructions that were handled
directly in hardware by the larger
ones. From smallest to largest, the
first wave of System/360 machines
differed by a factor of 500 in memory
capacity and a factor of approximately
20 in processor performance.
The machines were all supposed to
run a single operating system, with the
bigger ones loading more modules and
turning on more features. That part of
the plan didn’t work out so well. Fred
Brooks’ classic study of the problems
of OS/360, The Mythical Man Month,
was a founding text of software engineering and helped win him an ACM
A.M. Turing Award.
Despite these problems, IBM’s
gamble paid off magnificently. IBM’s
core platform evolved through countless new models over the next 50 years,
though the 370, 380, and 390 ranges
and on to today’s System z machines.
These never dropped backward compatibility with the 360 range and IBM
never lost its dominance of the mainframe market. Its most direct competitors of the 1960s, including General
Electric, which was still a much larger
firm, were unwilling to match this investment. Most exited the computer
business over the next decade. IBM was
dominant at home and abroad.
Supporting Great Design
For Watson Jr., greatness included a
commitment to elegance in design and
the finest in modern architecture. An
IBM System 360 featured prominently
in the recent TV show Mad Men, where
its stylish complexity symbolized the
rise of analytic approaches to advertising. Today the clean, confident design
aesthetic of the 1950s and early 1960s
is more popular than ever. Period houses, furniture, and consumer products
sell for a premium. No company did
more to popularize that aesthetic and
bring it into the American mainstream
than IBM.
As documented by John Harwood
in his book The Interface: IBM and the
Transformation of Corporate Design,
1945–1976, IBM’s design chief, Eliot
Noyes, assembled one of the most influential teams in history. Their skills
were applied not only to the firm’s
computers and office products, which