IBM’s first customer in Italy, the Italian state-owned Ferrovie dello Stato (Italian Railways) turned to IBM in 1928 to automate its administrative processes.
The result was an inventory of spare parts that drastically reduced waste and statistical traffic analysis that helped to schedule and allocate trains.
Italian Railways was one of the first organizations to fully exploit the advantages of IBM’s large-scale, large-volume data management capabilities.
IBM’s work there led to railway engagements in India, the Netherlands, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Cuba, France, Guatemala, Hungary, Mexico, Poland and Yugoslavia.
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IBM’s latest computer, code-named “Watson” leverages the leading edge Question-Answering technology, allowing the computer to process and understand natural language.
It incorporates massively parallel analytical capabilities to emulate the human mind’s ability to understand the actual meaning behind words, distinguish between relevant and irrelevant content, and ultimately, demonstrate confidence to deliver precise final answers.
In February of 2011, Watson will make history by being the first computer to compete against humans on television’s venerable quiz show, Jeopardy!.
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In 1987, IBM, working with the U.S. National Science Foundation and our partners at MCI and Merit designed a new high-speed National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) to connect US universities and 6 US-based supercomputer centers.
The NSFNET greatly increased the capacity of the Internet (increasing the bandwidth of backbone links from 56 Kilobits/sec to 1.5 Megabits/sec to 45 Megabits/sec) and greatly increased the reliability and reach of the Internet—reaching more than 50 million users in 93 countries when management of the Internet infrastructure was transferred to the telecom carriers and commercial Internet Service Providers in 1995.
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The world’s first hard disk drive was the size of two kitchen refrigerators set side by side.
It contained 24 disks spinning at 1,200 revolutions per minute, supplying data at 100,000 bits per second. It was the IBM RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control), and it allowed enterprises to think about data in new ways—mixing and matching it on the fly, allowing each bit of information to be read or changed randomly.
Along with IBM’s magnetic tape drive, the 1956 release of RAMAC essentially launched the data storage industry.
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In 1981, three IBM scientists—Rangaswamy Srinivasan, James Wynne and Samuel Blum—discovered how the newly invented excimer laser could remove specific human tissue without harming the surrounding area and do so on an extremely minute scale—a process that became the foundation for LASIK and PRK surgery.
The painless procedure, which changes the shape of the cornea, has improved the vision and quality of life for millions of people around the world.
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In 1969, IBM engineer Forrest Parry had a problem.
He was trying to affix a strip of magnetized tape with a piece of plastic to create an identity card for the CIA, but he was struggling to combine the two components.
When he mentioned the problem to his wife, who happened to be ironing clothing at the time, she suggested that he use the iron to melt the strip on.
He tried it, and it worked.
The magnetic stripe, when combined with point-of-sale devices and data networks, was one of the catalysts that accelerated the proliferation of credit card usage around the world, transforming commerce forever.
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Thomas Watson Sr. always believed in making his workers feel dignified.
In 1934, he bucked a trend toward paying factory workers in piecework, instead paying by the hour.
Continuing the tradition, in 1958 IBM became the first industrial organization to place all regular, hourly-rated domestic employees on a salary basis.
This change in pay practice made all domestic employees part of same basic compensation plan, providing its workforce with economic stability and equality.
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