Visitors entering the T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY, are greeted by glass cases displaying historical calculating machines, from the abacus to Leon Bolle's multiplier. The objects do honor to IBM's history. They also serve as reminders to the people who work here that IBM's products today are not at all what they used to be.

IBM's track record in corporate research is almost unparalleled. The company routinely nabs the greatest number of U.S. patents in a given year. Its researchers have won two Nobel Prizes in physics. Its laboratories invented magnetic storage, the first formalized computer language (Fortran), fractals, the relational database, and the scanning tunneling microscope. If quantum computers ever do arrive, it will be in large part because of developments at IBM Research.