Happy Birthday Big Blue

[shenley]

IBM is 100 years old. Official site and The Register's take

Here's to the next 100 years!

 

Like many others, I cut my teeth on IBM big irons, in my case 35 years ago, when computer rooms looked like this

http://www.krohm.com/history/ibm360.gif

The IBM S/360 machines like this that I worked on typically had 100kB memory. A really big one 256kB! That's all you needed. Code had to be efficient, Hardware was expensive, both to buy and to run. You had to squeeze as much performance out of the box as possible. Bloatware was non-existent. Ah happy days.

[elsiegee40]

Happy Birthday IBM. I started out on punch cards in the days of yore too. Computer rooms were heating buildings and a fast response time was guaranteed if fast meant an hour or two

 

I remember the acronym used in the 90s when IBM came a cropper thanks to the PC revolution

"I Blame Microsoft"

[X-13]

I'm 22 and what is IBM?

[Jawloms]

I remember the acronym used in the 90s when IBM came a cropper thanks to the PC revolution

"I Blame Microsoft"

 

The one I heard most frequently was "It's Being Mended". Their laptops did go through quite a poor patch at one point. They should stick with the server side of things. We have two IBM BladeCentres here and they seem pretty much indestructable!

[unixman]

Ah the big iron days. It really meant something when you said you worked with computers. Today, everyone is a computer expert (or so they think). In the first 10 years of my career, computers changed very fast. Mini-computers such as the PDP-8 came out (50,000 units sold) and computers began to appear in smaller companies. Only really big companies like banks, insurance companies, ICI, General Motors, 3M, etc could afford machines such as the beloved IBM 360 series. $1,500,000 if I recall correctly and that was in 1975.

 

With the development of the PC (the Personal Computer, your computer which sat on your desk) it all changed. It all could have been so exciting, but Microsoft came along, become dominant and stagnated development. Windows hasn't really changed much in 20 years, you just need more powerful hardware to run it. Windows 7 requires 1 GHz processor and 1 MB RAM to support one user. Why so much? I used to work on IBM System/1 and we ran 55 users with 128K RAM (character terminals) and 142K when we went to GUI.

 

The world owes IBM and it's staff a huge debt. Common place IBM develoments include UPC (check your groceries for one), nondiscrimination work policy (in the 1950s, they were one of the first companies to develop one), the punch card, FET memory, the PC, electronic catalog (on-line shopping), the floppy disk, etc, etc.

 

Happy birthday indeed Big Blue. Without you, I wouldn't be where I am today. (No, I'd probably be happily working as a haberdasher rather than being peed off in computer support. )

 

Musically, Microsoft gave us "bing, bong, bing bing"; IBM gave us IBM Rally Song

[witch]

Happy birthday from here as well. I used to recruit all sorts to work on IBM beasts and learned quite a lot - once the guys working with them knew I was a test tech they used to spend ages showing me the kit and explaining it. Ah, those were the days

[broc]

When I worked for IBM it stood for I've Been Moved..... I never stayed in any role longer than 4 years..... in a career that spanned almost 30 years.

 

In the mid 70s until the mid 1990s it was a great company to work for, until the bean counters & accountants took over. I was glad to take early retirement in 2002......

[AngryTechnician]

"I'm Being Managed" was my favourite. When I was there I once had 3 different managers in the space of a year.

[Earthling]

IBM is 100 years old.The IBM S/360 machines like this that I worked on typically had 100kB memory. Ah happy days.

 

I started on a 360/30 in November of 1970. A massive 64k of memory, 3 disks (as I remember), paper-tape, punch-card, 6 tape-decks and 3 disk drives, and a printer, as I recall. Bit of a low-end mainframe compared to the one in the picture. Eleven-hour shifts, 4 nights on, 4 off, 5 days on, 5 off or some such. Every 64 shifts, we had to top-up our hours by working from 6.30pm to 11pm, in addition to the normal shift...........Happy Days, indeed.