100 Years of IBM in Pictures

By Kristina Bjoran

From clocks to supercomputers, IBM has a rich history of technological developments. Here’s a look back at its most notable innovations.

Previous Next

IBM 4 (1956)

IBM’s RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control), an early computer designed for accounting, was introduced in 1956. The whole system was about the size of two side-by-side refrigerators and weighed about 10 tons. It contained the world's first magnetic hard disk drive, capable of storing 10 megabits of information.

Credit: IBM

330 Days Ago
07/01/2011

Punch-card Technology

If you were being really honest, you'd have attributed this to what it was in fact developed for.

I'll let those who are curious look it up for themselves, but needless to say, it wasn't for a benign purpose like helping the US Census...

328 Days Ago
07/03/2011

@Who Me?

You're right that punch-cards weren't first used for the census.

The first use was to maliciously control textile looms to make patterns in the weave more easily, this is the first use of punch cards, though in this case for control programming, not for data.

Charles Babage suggested using them for computing while he was designing his engines.

After that, the first ever use of punch cards for data was to tabulate the 1890 american census.

I have no idea what silly conspiracy theory you think punch cards were used for, but it remains factual that their first significant use in data processing was for the census.

326 Days Ago
07/05/2011

*cough* Nazi concentration camps *cough*

325 Days Ago
07/06/2011

You are aware punch cards were first used for the 1890 census, which I think predates the Nazi holocost, as well as the Nazi party, by a few decades.

326 Days Ago
07/05/2011

"One" of the earliest documented commercial use of Punch Card technology was during the Manhattan Project.

326 Days Ago
07/05/2011

While to my knowledge, this is an article about a company that has never promoted itself as being a media company, given the sense of the word history as derived from it's crystal clear use in the context of the title of this article, I would venture to assert it's definition would have very little to do with, nor be in any way enhanced by, anything that could be even remotely construed as innuendo.

326 Days Ago
07/05/2011

Punch-cards

Suggest you all look here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/jacquard_loom

326 Days Ago
07/05/2011

Missing the mainframe era photos.

To some it might be old hat, but a lot of us boomers cut our teeth on the 360/370 and 390 era mainframe computers. Technology that is now being incorprated into the PC/server world originated with the mainframes. Bi-sync type protocols are finally being utilized by the web. IBM's Virtual Machine technology has been around since 1972. Java vm and MS vm arrived nearly 20 years later. So be it.

325 Days Ago
07/06/2011

Actually, the first vm IBM had was CP/67 of that year, which ran with a hardware assist not available on other S/360. The machine supported paging and segmentation, 4096 segments each with 256 4Kbyte pages, and had other modifications that made it possible to simulate multiple virtual 360s efficiently.

323 Days Ago
07/08/2011

Indeed OS/2 had the virtual machine down pat and MS came along and took it. I suspect without it that MS would not have made it as far as they did.

323 Days Ago
07/08/2011

IBM would be kings of all the computing worlds

except they couldn't imagine there being any real market for "Personal Computers"

their notions of what they do as a company. kept them tied to bigger is better...

289 Days Ago
08/11/2011

Watson was staged

The whole Watson/Jeopardy stunt took place in a studio with canned questions and answers. It was a publicity stunt and there was no chance the humans would win. It's really weaselly the way IBM framed all of this. It's not even cutting edge AI. It's expert system technology that was around in the 1970's, and they realized then it was a cheap parlor trick.