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What do you think of when you hear the name IBM? Maybe the first things you think about are home computers or business laptops. Maybe you think of IBM as a company that runs data centers. It’s not that these impressions are wrong exactly, it’s just that IBM is like an iceberg from a public point of view. We get to interact with a small public-facing part of the company, but don’t get to see the majority of the work going on under the surface.
The truth is that IBM is one of the most important technology research institutions in history. To take a recent example, while companies like OpenAI get all the attention with breakthrough AI technology, IBM spent over 70 years advancing the field so that current AI companies could take the baton across the finish line.
But it’s not just amazing tech demos like IBM’s Watson managing to beat people in Jeopardy or (much more recently) IBM’s cutting-edge Granite 4.0 Nano AI that you can run locally in your web browser. The venerable International Business Machines (IBM) invented technologies that affect your life every day, and even these are only scratching the surface.
IBM’s punched cards were a computer industry knockout.
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Depending on your age, your earliest experience of storing data to use on a computer might be wildly different. Perhaps your first computer used cassette tapes, like the ZX Spectrum. Perhaps your first computer used a big floppy disk format, or the smaller, stiffer 3.5″ floppy that came later. If you’re younger, your first computer might have had a CD burner. These days, we have 100GB Blu-rays, thumb drives that hold gigabytes of data, and tiny SD cards that can squeeze more than a terabyte into something the size of a fingernail.
Before all of that, there was the paper punched card. Now, IBM didn’t invent the punched card. They’ve existed as long as industrial automation. Early versions of punched cards were used to “program” looms and were a major part of the Second Industrial Revolution, where the cards moved from being used in textiles to controlling electromechanical systems. What IBM did was to take punched card technology and standardize it for computers. The “IBM card” was “a thin piece of stiff cardboard measuring 7⅜ inches by 3¼ inches comprising 80 columns, 12 rows and a series of tiny rectangular holes.”
At one point, according to IBM, most of the data in the world was stored on punched cards. Punched cards are also the origin of the common computing term “patch.” Since errors in a punch card could be fixed by literally patching it or punching additional holes.
IBM’s hard drive was the size of two fridges, but it changed everything
It’s difficult to imagine a modern computer without a hard drive. Yes, we’ve moved to SSDs today, which are much faster and generally more reliable than hard drives, but the “spinning rust” storage device is far from obsolete. Even if your computer or laptop doesn’t have one inside, you may have an external drive somewhere, and big data centers make extensive use of hard drives with massive storage capacities in the tens of terabytes.
While you can buy a hard drive with over 30TB of storage space today if you want to, it all started with a 5MB drive called the IBM RAMAC. This beast of a machine needed a forklift or a crew of burly human loaders to transport it, and was a revolutionary replacement for punched cards. This was the first “random access” drive and meant that information lookups on mainframes went from taking hours or days to just a few seconds.
The RAMAC was produced in the ’50s, but by the ’80s, with the rise of personal computers, hard drives were small enough to fit inside a small desk computer. If you bought a more expensive model, you could get them in ludicrous capacities like 40 megabytes. How could anyone ever fill that much space? In seriousness, hard drives changed the world even before they entered our homes, and it’s one of IBM’s greatest achievements.
IBM’s Memory Disk would go on to take over the world
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“Don’t copy that floppy!” was a popular anti-piracy campaign from the ’90s, and showed just how popular this computer disk format had become. Using a magnetic film disc inside a plastic sleeve, home computers with floppy drives could easily save, run, or install software using this inexpensive technology.
But the world-changing floppy (originally called the IBM Memory Disk) wasn’t invented for home computers at all. The research that would lead to the floppy started in 1967 in the IBM San Jose Research Lab. It was called “Project Minnow,” and the goal was to find a better way to enter data into mainframes and install updates. While these mainframes already had hard drives, punched cards were still being used to load data into the machines. Filling up five megabytes of hard drive capacity with thousands and thousands of punched cards is no one’s idea of fun, and the amount of data that needed to be transferred would grow over time.
Magnetic tape was the first option, but with Project Minnow, the researchers found that a Mylar disk coated with magnetic material could be used to read and write information. It was sort of like a flexible hard drive platter, but the spindle, motor, and drive heads were in the drive, and you could change out the disk as needed. The format isn’t completely dead either. For example, airplanes still use floppy disks for their software!
IBM’s ATM design made getting your cash easier and safer than ever
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Many parts of the world are moving towards being cashless today, but paper money is still important, and has been for decades. However, getting your cash used to be a labor-intensive process. You’d have to go into a bank, speak to a teller, go through a verification process, and then, some time later, walk out of the bank with your money. The advent of the Automated Teller Machine, or ATM, brought on a banking revolution.
Now, human tellers could focus on more complex and important services, and you could get cash from your account at any time of day in just a minute or two. Even better, you don’t even have to go to a bank. With ATMs at every gas station and shopping mall, cash became that much more convenient. None of this would have been possible without IBM.
IBM developed several of the key technologies that make an ATM practical. The magnetic stripe that still adorns modern chip-and-PIN cards is perhaps the most important. It allowed information about the account holder to be stored on the card and read immediately. Combined with a PIN, it was secure enough for the time. Though with attacks like the NGate Android phone ATM scam, these machines remain a juicy target for criminals to this day, and ATMs and cards keep advancing to thwart them.
The UPC barcode system changed your life and you didn’t even notice
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In case you haven’t noticed, just about everything you buy has a barcode on it. This is what allows a cashier to rapidly tally your shopping; it allows companies to do inventory with ease, and it makes worldwide shipping of the stuff you buy online cheaper, as packages are automatically tracked using their barcodes.
A barcode is a pattern of light and dark stripes of varying width that encodes a number. That number represents an entry in a database somewhere, and it removes so much manual data entry (and errors!) that it’s hard to imagine a world without them.
It was George Laurer of IBM who led the project that would become the UPC or Universal Product Code. The code offered a standardized machine-readable image that could be scaled up, scaled down, and used in any situation where you needed unique labels for objects. Today, we still use UPC, but others have built on the concept with more sophisticated solutions like QR codes, which can store enough text for a website address. QR codes are everywhere, but it’s unlikely the humble UPC itself will ever fall out of use completely.
DRAM makes the world go round, and IBM invented it
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As we write this, the world is undergoing a massive computer memory shortage caused by AI data centers, and it’s wreaking havoc on prices. Hopefully, it will be over when you read this, but clearly, DRAM or Dynamic Random-Access Memory is important, and we have IBM to thank for its existence.
When IBM invented the RAMAC hard drive, it revolutionized data storage and retrieval speeds, but it’s still relatively slow when it comes to feeding data into a computer processor. At that time in the ’50s, computers used magnetic core memory or expensive SRAM that needed six transistors to store just a single bit of data. In 1966, IBM’s Robert Dennard came up with an idea to store a bit of data using just a single transistor, and that was the foundation for what would eventually become DRAM.
This new type of memory stores a charge that represents a one or a zero, which is all you need to represent a bit of data. The patent was awarded in 1968, and just about every computer today uses DRAM along with every computer-adjacent product, from smart washing machines to jet fighter planes.
Virtual Machines make your life easier and safer even if you don’t know it
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Even though you might not work with them directly, VMs or Virtual Machines are a crucial part of modern computing. To put it in simple terms, a virtual machine is a simulated computer running on a real computer, often referred to as the “host” or the “bare metal” system. The operating system of the virtual machine doesn’t know the difference, but there’s a layer of separation. So, for example, you could have a computer running Microsoft Windows on bare metal, and have a Linux virtual machine running inside that.
What’s the point? Well, anything bad that happens to the virtual machine can’t affect the host. It’s also a great way to make full use of a computer that might have hundreds of CPU cores and terabytes of RAM, as is often the case in data centers. You could have dozens or hundreds of virtual servers doing their individual jobs without affecting one another or the host. There are also security benefits to VMs, and they’re useful for software development too. Really, VMs have a long list of clever uses, and we can discuss them all day, but the bottom line is they’re important.
So you might be surprised to know that IBM invented virtualization technology all the way back in the ’60s. It was developed to allow their mainframes to run multiple operating systems at once on the same hardware.
Your PC was probably invented by IBM
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Most of the personal computers in the world today descend directly from the original IBM PC. Specifically, the IBM PC 5150, which was unleashed on the world in 1981. It can be a little confusing, because any computer that’s meant for personal use is a “PC,” but when we talk about PCs versus, for example, Apple Mac computers, it has a very specific meaning. The IBM PC represents a specific architecture, and (in theory) software written for this 1981 computer should still run on a modern PC from the 2020s. Though in practice it’s rarely that straightforward.
The irony is that the IBM PC architecture came to dominate the world in a way that didn’t please IBM. It was the rise of legal IBM-compatible clones that popularized it and, by extension, blew up the market for PC software, such as the MS-DOS operating system and popular productivity software packages.
By inadvertently creating an open ecosystem, IBM’s technology became the foundation for PCs today. Since anyone could create hardware or software for IBM PCs, it led to competition. Hardware and software improved rapidly, and whether it was the intention or not, the IBM clone wars birthed a standardized PC market. Ultimately, it was to IBM’s benefit, but ironically, IBM exited the PC market in 2005, when it sold its personal computing division to Lenovo.
IBM invented the language behind modern data
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Whether you know it or not, you interact with computer databases daily. Whether it’s an app, a website, or accessing your own bank account, it very likely relies on SQL or a SQL-based system.
IBM’s RAMAC hard drive laid the physical groundwork for the invention of the relational database, which got its start when Edgar F. “Ted” Codd published a paper while working at the IBM San Jose Research lab. Titled “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks,” this showed how data could be stored using tables that are queried mathematically quickly and efficiently. While this theoretical work didn’t need the invention of the hard drive to exist, without something like RAMAC, you’d have no way to implement it effectively.
IBM researchers built on this foundational model and came up with SEQUEL (Structured English Query Language), which made it simple to write queries to retrieve data from a relational database. Today we know that language as SQL, and it’s now the standard language for relational databases. Essentially, IBM invented the storage device, then invented the database model that could effectively use that device, and topped it off by inventing the very language we use to access that data!
IBM advanced science with its scanning tunneling microscope
While it’s interesting to know about the IBM inventions that affect our daily lives directly, the company did plenty of fundamental research that advanced science itself. In 1981, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer developed the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) at IBM’s Zurich lab. This device measures quantum forces between a sharp tip and the surface that’s being scanned.
This allows you to map an object at the atomic level. In other words, for the first time, scientists could look at individual atoms! Beyond simply being able to look at these fundamental building blocks of matter, the STM allows you to manipulate atoms, making it the first major step towards developing nanotechnology.
Of course, this wasn’t completely altruistic research. If you work with semiconductors where components measure in micrometers and, eventually, nanometers, you need some way to see what you’ve produced at that scale. Nonetheless, this amazing microscope had an immediate impact on all physical sciences that deal with the atomic structures of physical objects. This is a wonderful list of accomplishments, but don’t think that IBM’s research has stopped! We can’t help but be excited for whatever game-changing discoveries we’ll get from Big Blue in this century!
