X-Nico

100 unusual facts about "IBM-compatible" personal computers


14th Weather Squadron

At this time, IBM electronic accounting equipment installed at the Climatic Center allowed data processing directly from punched card to tape.

1965 Official Guide New York World's Fair

Major exhibits in this section appear to have been General Motors' Futurama, General Electric's Progressland, IBM's dome and the Eastman Kodak Pavilion.

1990 PGA Championship

Concerns about racial discrimination in the club's membership caused many sponsors to pull their network television advertising, including IBM.

1994 ATP Tour World Championships

The 1994 ATP Tour World Championships (also known for the singles event as the IBM-ATP Tour World Championship for sponsorship reasons) were tennis tournaments played on indoor carpet courts.

1995 ATP Tour World Championships

The 1995 ATP Tour World Championships (also known for the singles event as the IBM-ATP Tour World Championship for sponsorship reasons) were tennis tournaments played on indoor carpet courts.

7 Billion Actions

IBM: As a way to celebrate their 100th anniversary, IBM is launching its Global Celebration of Service, a worldwide volunteer service initiative which calls for staff to donate their time and energy for specific social causes.

A Real Partnership

The one-page summary for the Cabinet (to which Sir Frank refers as the “Janet and John bit”) makes the case by comparing similar jobs in industry, namely the directors of BP and IBM.

ACF2

The "2" also helped to distinguish the product from IBM's ACF/VTAM.

Anubhav Anand

This IT professional from IBM, did his education to please his parents but his passion was always films.

APAR

Authorized Program Analysis Report, in IBM nomenclature, a problem officially recognized and diagnosed by IBM's support department.

Barbara Keeley

Keeley's early career was with IBM, working first as a Systems Engineer and then as a Field Systems Engineering Manager.

Best Selling Secrets

IBM T2x ThinkPad laptop computers were also featured as mobile workstations of choice for the characters.

Bykenhulle

Later owners of Bykenhulle have included an IBM executive and the current bed and breakfast operators, both of whom have continued to maintain the property's historic character.

CCSID

CCSID is an abbreviation used by IBM to mean "Coded Character Set Identifier".

Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise

Companies and organizations such as General Electric, IBM, The International Finance Corporation, Pfizer and Shell Hydrogen have partnered with the Center to sponsor projects conducted by teams of students under the guidance of faculty.

Code page

IBM introduced the concept of systematically assigning a small, but globally unique, 16 bit number to each character encoding that a computer system or collection of computer systems might encounter.

Dominant design

When a new technology emerges (e.g. computer GUI operating systems) – often firms will introduce a number of alternative designs (e.g. MicrosoftWindows, Apple Inc.Mac OS and IBMOS/2).

Durham Energy Institute

Its board of advisors includes Ian Burdon, Benj Sykes DONG Energy, John Loughhead UKERC, Helen Moss IBM and Andrew Mill Narec.

Dynamic loading

IBM's strategic transaction processing system, CICS (1970s onwards) uses dynamic loading extensively both for its kernel and for normal application program loading.

Edmund Skellings

Skellings' system of organizing text on a color monitor led to the publication of a color authoring system entitled Electric Poet by International Business Machines Inc. in 1984 and a further product entitled Easy Street by McGraw-Hill.

End-of-transmission character

The EOT character is used in legacy communications protocols by mainframe computer manufacturers such as IBM, Burroughs Corporation, and the BUNCH.

Georges Frêche

Building on the trend started by his predecessor François Delmas, who landed the Southern Europe IBM factory and headquarters as well as the scientific university, Frêche expanded Montpellier in all directions, propelling it from the 25th-largest city in France to the eighth, in less than 30 years.

Giora Leshem

In addition, he studied computer operating systems at IBM.

Howard H. Aiken

Howard Hathaway Aiken (March 8, 1900 – March 14, 1973) was a pioneer in computing, being the original conceptual designer behind IBM's Harvard Mark I computer.

Hugh Henry

He has worked as an accountant with IBM UK Ltd, as a teacher and as a welfare rights officer with Strathclyde Regional Council.

IBM Big Blue

IBM Big Blue is a Japanese semi-professional rugby union team in the Top League, founded in 1976 by IBM.

IBM railway station

As the name suggests, it is located within the confines of a large facility formerly owned entirely by IBM, a former major employer for the town of Greenock.

IBM's The Great Mind Challenge

International Business Machines (IBM), which was founded in 1896 as The Tabulating Machine Company, is a multinational computer, technology and IT consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, North Castle, New York, United States.

IFPS

IFPS was available for a variety of platforms, including IBM mainframes (VM/CMS), DEC VAX, various flavors of Unix, DOS-based PCs and Macintosh Computers (named "Mindsight"- running on two floppies).

Imperative programming

FORTRAN, developed by John Backus at IBM starting in 1954, was the first major programming language to remove the obstacles presented by machine code in the creation of complex programs.

Independent software vendor

The companies that make the platforms, such as Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Novell, Google, Oracle, Apple, SAP and salesforce.com encourage and lend support to ISVs, often with special "business partner" programs.

InfiniBand Trade Association

The IBTA was established in 1999, and a few of its prominent members include IBM, Intel, Mellanox, Oracle, HP, and Cray.

Instruction step

OLIVER (CICS interactive test/debug) for IBM CICS, allowed both instruction and HLL statement stepping

Insulin pump

In August 2011, an IBM researcher, Jay Radcliffe, demonstrated a security flaw in insulin pumps.

Internet Evolution

Internet Evolution was launched in October, 2007 by UBM Techweb with sponsorship from technology and consulting firm IBM.

James C. McGroddy Prize for New Materials

The James C. McGroddy Prize for New Materials is a prize that has been awarded annually by the American Physical Society since 1975, but was only given that name following its endowment by IBM in 1999.

Jeannette K. Watson Fellowship

The fellowship is a program of the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, named after the wife of IBM founder Thomas J. Watson.

June 1990 Mineriad

In the Television building, the film archive was destroyed, along with IBM subtitle machines, montage rooms and mobile phones.

Kissing Jessica Stein

Her mother had invited an IBM executive in hopes of setting him up with Jessica.

Klaus Darga

Klaus retired as a chess professional and became a computer programmer for IBM.

La Gaude

IBM established a research centre in La Gaude in the 1960s.

Lehmer random number generator

The GNU Scientific Library includes several random number generators of the Lehmer form, including MINSTD, RANF, and the infamous IBM random number generator RANDU.

Liz Phillips

Phillips has also collaborated with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and her work was presented by the Cleveland Orchestra, IBM, and the World Financial Center.

Majestic Centre

As of 2006, IBM New Zealand is the anchor tenant, with naming rights to the building.

Meedan

Meedan has received more than $3.2 million in research and development support from IBM to further the development of its Arabic-English Automated Translation technology and to support Meedan’s ongoing work on “a social media sharing platform bridging the Arabic and English speaking communities”.

Meedan’s translation technology has been developed in collaboration with The Watson Research Group at IBM with which it entered into a research partnership in 2006.

Message Passing Interface

IBM also was an early implementor, and most early 90s supercomputer companies either commercialized MPICH, or built their own implementation.

Military Ordinariate of Lithuania

Gintaras Grusas (appointed 19 June 2010 - named Archbishop of Vilnius 5 April 2013) Bishop Grusas, 51 (born 1961), was originally a technological consultant for marketing at IBM and was born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Los Angeles.

Modern Literal Version

Started originally in 1987 on two IBM clone 8086 and 80286 computers, this is probably the first computerized translation of the New Testament.

Morten Andreas Meyer

In 2006 he was hired as director of the Business Consulting Services division in IBM Norway.

MSI Barcode

There are two modulo 11 algorithms which use different repeated weighting factor patterns: the IBM algorithm which uses (2,3,4,5,6,7), and the NCR algorithm which uses (2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9).

New York State Route 113

West of the interchange, NY 113 continues as a local road into the IBM Poughkeepsie main plant.

Spackenkill Road initially followed what is now IBM Road through the interchange with US 9 and into the IBM plant, where it ended at the CR 48 portion of IBM Road.

New York State Route 134

For a short distance after the interchange, NY 134 becomes four lanes as the road serves IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center.

Norman Longworth

He then commenced his more academic career as UNESCO-IBM Professor of Information Technology ate Southampton University on secondment from IBM, a progression which has continued to the present.

Object-oriented operating system

Taligent was an object-oriented operating system project, started by Apple Inc. and jointly developed with IBM in the 1990s.

Open Universities Australia

In June 2012, IBM used the organization as an IT case study after implementing a new IT strategy.

OpenGL Performer

However after the first beta release of Cosmo 3D, SGi joined with Intel and IBM (and later DEC) to create OpenGL++, essentially a cleaned up version of Cosmo.

OpenGL++

The project started as the result of a partnership between SGI, IBM and Intel (and later Digital Equipment Corporation as well) to provide a higher level API than the "bare metal" support of OpenGL, as well as being an implementation for Java3D.

OpenMAX

Promoting members in 2008 were AMD, Apple, ARM, Creative, Dell Inc, Ericsson, Freescale, Imagination Technologies Group plc, Intel, IBM, Motorola, Nokia, Nvidia Corporation, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd, SK Telecom, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc and Texas Instruments.

Orange County Astronomers

The game changer was the standardization by IBM of the personal computer and the Operating system by Microsoft.

Paul Rand

IBM, ABC, Cummins Engine, UPS, and the now-infamous Enron, among many others, owe Rand their graphical heritage.

Paul Rand (August 15, 1914 – November 26, 1996) was an American art director and graphic designer, best known for his corporate logo designs, including the logos for IBM, UPS, Enron, Morningstar, Inc., Westinghouse, ABC, and Steve Jobs's NeXT.

Porto Salvo

This includes several facilities maintained by the Instituto Superior Técnico, several large-scale IT facilities, Millennium BCP and the former IBM/PT-SI co-hosting data-center.

Poughkeepsie Day School

A new capital campaign in 1994, involving donations from individuals and grants from foundations, funded a move to a new location in buildings formerly owned by IBM on Boardman Road, which is the school's current location.

Premiership of Morarji Desai

The policy proved controversial, diminishing foreign investment and led to the high-profile exit of corporations such as Coca-Cola and IBM from India.

Program animation

On the IBM System 360 processor range, these facilities were provided by front panel switches, buttons and banks of neon lights.

QuickTransit

In August 2006, IBM announced a partnership with Transitive to run Linux/x86 binaries on its Power Architecture based Power Systems machines.

R.J. Harlick

In her former career R.J. Harlick worked for major computer corporations such as IBM and DMR Group, then with her own management consultancy practice.

Raymond Ameijide

Ameijide served as an illustrator a variety of clients, including Fortune, National Geographic, IBM, Pfizer, TV Guide, Chase Manhattan, Discover, Harcourt Brace and the United States Post Office (per his obituary January 12, 2000, TheJournalNews.com).

Robert Methuen, 7th Baron Methuen

Methuen worked as design engineer for Westinghouse Brake and Signal Company from 1957 to 1967, and then as computer systems engineer for IBM UK Ltd from 1968 to 1975 and for Rolls-Royce plc from 1975 to 1994.

Roberta Langtry

Most likely her best investment was in shares of IBM, which she purchased in either the 1940s or 1950s.

Roberto Busa

In 1949 he met with Thomas J. Watson, the founder of IBM, and was able to persuade him to sponsor the Index Thomisticus.

Roy Kuhlman

Later he was hired by the public relations firm Ruder & Finn to establish an in-house art department, then joined Benton & Bowles, where he designed the award-winning Mathematics Serving Man campaign for IBM, which appeared in Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report in May 1960.

Sampson House

The announcement also stated that "Sampson House comprises 386,288sq.ft. of office space let to IBM UK Limited. The lease expires in December 2025 but, includes a mutual break clause in June 2018. The current rent is £8 million p.a. and will rise to £9.5 million p.a. in December this year".

Service Update Management Assistant

SUMA automates the retrieval of maintenance updates from IBM.

Sharon Hayes

Hayes is a graduate of the Honours Math and Computer Science program at the University of Waterloo; while enrolled there, she worked as a co-op student with the Toronto Stock Exchange and IBM.

Silsesquioxane

Extensive research on silsesquioxanes as semiconductors, insulators and organic light emitting diodes (OLED) has been done by many companies and Universities, including Dow Corning, IBM, Honeywell, Japan Rubber Co, Hitachi, Mayaterials, Hybrid Plastics, University of Michigan and University of California-Irvine.

Six-bit character code

IBM applied the terms binary-coded decimal and BCD to the variations of BCD alphamerics used in most early IBM computers, including the IBM 1620, IBM 1400 series, and non-Decimal Architecture members of the IBM 700/7000 series.

Stan Lopata

After his professional baseball career was over, Lopata made a living by working at a steel plant in Dearborn, Michigan, later moving back to Philadelphia to work for IBM.

Stony Brook University Research and Development Park

CEWIT has established partnerships with IT companies including giants like IBM and Cisco Systems and formed partnerships with other leading research institutions.

Structured programming

Structured programming theorists gained a major ally in the 1970s after IBM researcher Harlan Mills applied his interpretation of structured programming theory to the development of an indexing system for the New York Times research file.

Su Huan-chih

With his academic experience in physics, he was hired by IBM Taiwan to serve as its patent attorney.

Sunday NFL Countdown

The official name is Sunday NFL Countdown presented by IBM.

Supervisory program

Historically, this term was essentially associated with IBM's line of mainframe operating systems starting with OS/360.

TaiKoo Place

The local headquarters of IBM is also situated there, occupying the first 15 storeys.

Teoma

Many parts of Teoma's relevancy algorithm were based on the methodology IBM developed for its CLEVER project.

There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom

These ideas were later realized by the use of the scanning tunneling microscope, the atomic force microscope and other examples of scanning probe microscopy and storage systems such as Millipede, created by researchers at IBM.

Thesaurus florentinus

Riccardo Dalla Negra and realised by Lapo Bertini, Silvia Brotini, Auro Pampaloni, Marco Menichetti, Lara Calosi and Arianna Sacchetti with the technological support of IBM and Eastman Kodak and the financial support of the Ministero dei Beni Culturali of Italy and Ente Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze.

Ulrich Steinhilper

As a post-war IBM typewriter salesman, he was an early proponent of word processing, considered by some to have either coined the phrase or even originated the concept.

Ulrich Walter

When the German astronaut team was merged into a European Space Agency, he did not transfer, but resigned to work at IBM Germany.

United States v. Jerome O'Hara and George Perez

Prosecutors claim that in April 2006, the two men tried to delete 218 computer programs from an IBM server known internally as "House 17".

UTF-16

IBM iSeries systems designate code page CCSID 13488 for UCS-2 character encoding, CCSID 1200 for UTF-16 encoding, and CCSID 1208 for UTF-8 encoding.

UTF-8

In August 1992, this proposal was circulated by an IBM X/Open representative to interested parties.

UTF-EBCDIC

IBM EBCDIC-based mainframe operating systems, such as z/OS, usually use UTF-16 for complete Unicode support.

Versit Consortium

The Versit Consortium was a multivendor initiative founded by Apple Computer, AT&T, IBM and Siemens in the early 1990s in order to create Personal Data Interchange (PDI) technology, open specifications for exchanging personal data over the Internet, wired and wireless connectivity and Computer Telephony Integration (CTI).

The core Versit CTI Encyclopedia technical team was composed of David H. Anderson and Marcus W. Fath from IBM, Frédéric Artru and Michael Bayer from Apple Computer, James L. Knight from AT&T (then Lucent Technologies), Tom Miller from Siemens, and consultants Ellen Feaheny and Charles Hudson.

Virtual storage

virtual memory; IBM uses "virtual storage" rather than "virtual memory"

Virtualization engine

A good example of virtualization is IBM's virtualization engine which offers a common way to address component level devices.

Zyll

It was written by Marshal Linder and Scott Edwards, two IBM employees, and marketed as an adventure game.


Hitachi Data Systems

NAS, as well as Amdahl (the other IBM-compatible mainframe maker), was no exception to facing the technological and sales pressure from IBM.

Hitachi Data Systems History

NAS, as well as Amdahl (the other IBM-compatible mainframe maker) was no exception to facing the technological and sales pressure from IBM.

OpenStep

NeXT's first operating system was NeXTSTEP, a sophisticated Mach-UNIX based operating system that originally ran only on NeXT's Motorola 68k-based workstations and that was then ported to run on 32-bit Intel x86-based "IBM-compatible" personal computers, PA-RISC-based workstations from Hewlett-Packard, and SPARC-based workstations from Sun Microsystems.

ZGI

Zork: Grand Inquisitor, a graphical adventure game released in 1997 for the IBM compatible PC and Apple Macintosh