IT History Society Blog

By now you must know that I am fond of historic plaques, especially ones that have to do with the District of Columbia or Northern Virginia. Here’s another one, from Arlington:The full text reads:

The ARPANET, a project of the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense, developed the technology that became the foundation for the internet at this site from 1970 to 1975. Originally intended to support military needs, ARPANET technology was soon applied to civilian uses, allowing information to be rapidly and widely available. The internet, and services such as e-mail, e-commerce and the World Wide Web, continues to grow as the under-lying technologies evolve. The innovations inspired by the ARPANET have provided great benefits for society.

ERECTED IN 2011 BY ARLINGTON COUNTY, VIRGINIA

It is in front of an anonymous building on Wilson Boulevard in Arlington, where ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office was located.

Below the plaque is a string of binary numbers. I will try to decipher them and let you know.

One more piece of trivia: across the street is another plaque, commemorating the parking garage where Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward met with “Deep Throat” to get the inside story of the Watergate break-in. It was likely that ARPA researchers were developing the TCP/IP protocols at the same time (they worked late into the night) as these meetings were taking place. Which had the greater impact on history?

Thirty years ago, the International Business Machines company introduced its first general-purpose personal computer, the 5150. (The IBM 5100 and DisplayWriter were also personal computing devices, but most people don’t count them as a first.)

Although I have written about August 1981, I would have forgotten about the anniversary except my friend Tom Pfaeffle linked a BBC article on his Facebook account. Most significantly, the article cited a blog posting by Mark Dean, an IBM executive who was there at the beginning:

It’s amazing to me to think that August 12 marks the 30th anniversary of the IBM Personal Computer. The announcement helped launch a phenomenon that changed the way we work, play and communicate. Little did we expect to create an industry that ultimately peaked at more than 300 million unit sales per year. I’m proud that I was one of a dozen IBM engineers who designed the first machine and was fortunate to have lead subsequent IBM PC designs through the 1980s.

What’s grabbing the attention is Dean’s claim that we’re already in the post-PC era:

It may be odd for me to say this, but I’m also proud IBM decided to leave the personal computer business in 2005, selling our PC division to Lenovo. While many in the tech industry questioned IBM’s decision to exit the business at the time, it’s now clear that our company was in the vanguard of the post-PC era.

I, personally, have moved beyond the PC as well. My primary computer now is a tablet. When I helped design the PC, I didn’t think I’d live long enough to witness its decline. But, while PCs will continue to be much-used devices, they’re no longer at the leading edge of computing. They’re going the way of the vacuum tube, typewriter, vinyl records, CRT and incandescent light bulbs.

The remainder of the posting goes on to discuss IBM’s success in the “post-PC era” and his own career trajectory from IBM Research to become CTO for IBM’s Middle East and Africa operations in Dubai.

I wonder if the claims of the post-PC era are a bit premature. I own a tablet too, but I’m writing this on a (Mac) personal computer because it has a bigger screen and a keyboard. It’s possible that we’re heading to the post-Windows, post-Mac era — one where the personal computers have a slightly different form factor but a new (smartphone or tablet) OS.

Still, as Tim Bresnahan and Shane Greenstein established in the late 20th century, computing platforms decline (or die) only when replaced another platform. So the idea that the PC will be replaced by something new is nothing new, but just another round of Schumpeterian revolution that claimed minicomputers and workstations — not to mention the mainframe businesses of the BUNCH.

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the 1911 formation of the Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation through the merger of the International Time Recording Company, the Computing Scale Company and the Tabulating Machine Company.

We probably wouldn’t care, except that in 1914 CTR appointed Thomas J. Watson, Sr. as its general manager. A decade later, the company renamed itself the “International Business Machines Corporation” and, as they say, the rest is history.

IBM has been doing a lot to celebrate its centennial, and there’s a flurry of news articles about the subject.

I would love to offer sage commentary on the role of IBM in computing history, but the list is to long to cover: punched cards, disk drives, platforms, software as a product, the mass-market PC, the shift from hardware to services. But that would be worth several books.
IBM is no longer the world’s most admired or most valuable IT company. Today, that’s Apple, the most important IT company of the past decade and arguably the past 25 years. However, no company has been more important than IBM to the history of computing for the past 100, 60 or even 40 years.

Putting my backward-looking historian’s perspective aside, IMHO what is most important about IBM is its ongoing ability to re-invent itself. Many big companies lose their way as they get mature (think Government Motors), and indeed IBM confronted and survived its own existential crisis in the 1990s under Lou Gerstner.

This is not a common trait. As I showed in my dissertation, Apple was heading off a cliff until the Jobs II era, and there’s a real question of what it will look like when he leaves again. AT&T has been reborn in name, but is an infrastructure-heavy cash cow rather than the onetime pillar of innovation.

So while IBM’s specific technologies are no longer as dominant as they once were, they still are a unique example of a successful mature technology company. Let’s come back in 65 years and see what Apple looks like.

“Programming” (and programming support) was an old data processing concept that originally was broadly defined as the adaptation of general-purpose devices to specific tasks.  Programming therefore goes back to Herman Hollerith wiring and rewiring (programming) his equipment to handle specific jobs.  By the early 1930s IBM was distributing information about novel (for the time) plugboard wiring diagrams to customers via a publication called Pointers.  Some of these diagrams were created by IBMers, but more importantly, many were created by customers who were willing to share their solutions with other customers.  A culture of programming support and sharing was well in place among IBM and its customers long before the S/360.  Actually, it was in place long before the first IBM 701 (the Defense Calculator) computer was installed.  Adapting this culture to meet the evolving requirements of its customers proved crucial to IBM’s success.

In August 1952, thirty representatives from the prospective customers for the IBM 701 were invited to the IBM facility at Poughkeepsie, NY for a week long training class.  This class also gave these pioneering customers  their first opportunity to test some programs they had written by running them on an engineering model of the IBM 701.  These customers also began sharing their programs amongst themselves.  They and their installations took a great deal of professional pride in developing programs and subroutines that were effective and put in use by other installations. Several of the participants at this training class decided to continue discussing programming and mutual problems on an informal basis.  They held their first meeting in February 1953 during the AIEE-IRE Computer Conference in Los Angeles, CA.  They decided to hold a subsequent meeting, which was hosted by the Douglas Aircraft Company in August 1953 in Santa Monica, CA.  This second meeting was attended by representatives from five companies with installed IBM 701s, and six IBM customers who had ordered, but not yet received their 701s.  Representatives from IBM also attended.

These informal customer meetings continued.  Then, in August, 1955 following an IBM symposium in Los Angeles, the RAND Corporation hosted a meeting consisting of representatives from seventeen installations that had ordered the IBM 704.  During this landmark meeting, the computer industry’s first “User’s organization” was formally created.  The name SHARE was chosen as its purpose was to promote the sharing of information and programs among the users of the IBM 704 computer and to influence IBM’s future developments in hardware and programming support.   As described in a June 1956 article by F. Jones (entitled SHARE-A Study in the Reduction of Redundant Programming Effort through the Promotion of Inter-Installation Communication), “SHARE is a voluntary, informal organization of the users of the IBM Type 704 electronic data processing machines.  It is devoted to 1) the standardization of machine language and certain machine practices, 2) the elimination of redundant effort expended in connection with use of the computer, 3) the promotion of inter-installation communication and 4) the development of a meaningful steam of information between the user and the manufacturer. 

By May 1956, SHARE membership was 47 installations, and this included all announced and prospective users of the IBM 704.  Other user groups formed over the next few years including USE (Univac Scientific Exchange) and GUIDE (at the time the organization for users of IBM’s business oriented computers). The highly cooperative nature of these user groups/organizations is suggested in excerpts from the November 1956 SHARE Conference Proceedings (Obligations of a SHARE member):  “It is expected that each member approach each discussion with an open mind, and having respect for the competence of other members, be willing to accept the opinions of others more frequently than he insists on his own.” 

Over the last 56 years, the SHARE organization has continued to grow.  SHARE has made numerous contributions to not just the initial development of computer programming as a discipline, but to the entire IBM customer install base, and in particular, to the IBM mainframe community around the world.  Of particular significance was the pioneering work of several west coast SHARE members on programs that manage and allocate the hardware and software resources of a computer to facilitate the writing and running of application programs (i.e. operating systems).  IBM’s first operating system, developed for the IBM 709 and introduced in 1959 was a direct outgrowth of this SHARE effort.  Hence the name SOS which was an acronym for SHARE Operating System.

The same spirit at SHARE continues today.  As SHARE members like to say “SHARE is not an acronym, it’s what we do.”  The next SHARE Conference is in August 2011 in Orlando, FL.