X-Nico

62 unusual facts about IBM


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.

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.

Anubhav Anand

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

Barbara Keeley

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

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.

Cahoot

Its business model involves a very small operational staff, with IT services initially in 2003 outsourced to IBM using their "Software on Demand" model.

CCSID

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

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.

Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas

On July 6, 1988, the day of the elections, a system shutdown of the IBM AS/400 that the government was using to count the votes occurred.

DBCS

Some IBM mainframes do have true DBCS code pages, which contain only the double byte portion of a multibyte code page.

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.

Excimer laser

-- Excimer laser light is typically absorbed within under a millionth of a meter (nanometer) of tissue. * * *a millionth of a meter is a micrometer, a billionth of a meter is a nanometer. Which one is it?* * *-->In 1980–1983, Rangaswamy Srinivasan, Samuel Blum and James Wynne at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center observed the effect of the ultraviolet excimer laser on biological materials.

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.

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 Building, Johannesburg

The building was initially built to house the South African headquarters of IBM, but after IBM moved their headquarters to Sandton, the building is unoccupied as of 2005.

IBM Rational Performance Tester

IBM Rational Performance Tester is a tool for automated performance testing of web and server based applications from the Rational Software division of IBM.

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).

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.

Internet Evolution

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

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.

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.

Lund v. Commonwealth

The computers were leased from IBM computers and the cost was distributed through various departments that used the computer facilities.

Majestic Centre

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

Mazovia encoding

A supplemental feature was that the block graphic characters of code page 437 remained unchanged (IBM's official Central-European code page 852 did not have this property, making programs like Norton Commander look funny with corners and joints of border lines broken by accented letters).

Message Passing Interface

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

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.

Mount Helen, Victoria

Mount Helen is the headquarters of Federation University Australia and the Ballarat Technology Park, a campus style office park with tenants including IBM, and a number of state government offices including the State Revenue Office, collectively employing more than 1,400 people.

New York State Route 113

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

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.

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.

Paul G. Comba

He then joined IBM as a software developer, and later as a member of the IBM Cambridge Scientific Center.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

UTF-EBCDIC

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

Versit Consortium

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"

Zyll

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


ALCS transaction monitor

It is a variant of TPF specially designed to provide all the benefits of TPF (very high speed, high volume, and high availability in transaction processing) but with the advantages such as easier integration into the data center offered by running on a standard IBM operating system platform.

American Airlines Flight 6780

Patterson was returning from meeting Thomas J. Watson of IBM, who had just hired him for a new case on the previous day.

Capability-based addressing

W. David Sincoskie, David J. Farber: SODS/OS: Distributed Operating System for the IBM Series/1.

Charles Flint

Charles Ranlett Flint (1850–1934), American businessman, founder of a company which later became IBM

Cluster Exploratory

"The cluster will consist of 1,600 processors, several terabytes of memory, and hundreds of terabytes of storage, along with the software, including IBM's Tivoli and open source versions of Google File System and MapReduce".

Cognos Reportnet

ReportNet is developed by Canada’s Ottawa based business intelligence (BI) and performance management solutions company Cognos (formerly Cognos Incorporated), an IBM company.

Customer engineer

Originally simply engineer, those who specialized in servicing IBM equipment in use by its customers were designated customer engineers by Tom Watson circa 1942.

ECC memory

This weakness is addressed by various technologies : Chipkill(IBM), Extended ECC(Sun Microsystems), Chipspare(Hewlett Packard) or SDDC=Single Device Data Correction(Intel).

Emanuel R. Piore

In 1967, his leadership at IBM was recognized by the Industrial Research Institute when it awarded him the illustrious IRI Medal.

Fredrik Rosing Bull

This team provided several and more effective new ideas the Bull machine, causing it to be superior to the Hollerith's one used then, the IBM precursor.

Hash function

Donald Knuth notes that Hans Peter Luhn of IBM appears to have been the first to use the concept, in a memo dated January 1953, and that Robert Morris used the term in a survey paper in CACM which elevated the term from technical jargon to formal terminology.

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.

IBM 1442

The 1442 Model 6 attached to an IBM System/3 or IBM 1130, read 300 cpm and punched 80 columns per second.

IBM 1500

Seeded by a research grant in 1964 from the U.S. Department of Education to the Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences at Stanford University, the IBM 1500 CAI system was initially prototyped at the Brentwood Elementary School (Ravenswood City School District) in East Palo Alto, California by Dr. Patrick Suppes of Stanford University.

IBM DB2 Commonstore

Part of the IBM Information Management portfolio which builds upon the DB2 database platform.

IBM LAN Server

The network client was called IBM LAN Requester and was included with OS/2 EE 1.1 by default.

IBM System/360 Model 40

The IBM System/360 Model 40 was developed and manufactured at IBM's facility in Poughkeepsie, U.S.A.: manufactured in Mainz, Germany; and manufactured in Fujisawa, Japan.

IBM Systems Network Architecture

While IBM is still providing support for SNA, one of the primary pieces of hardware, the 3745/3746 communications controller, has been withdrawn from the market by IBM.

Igor Ansoff

He has consulted with hundreds of multinational corporations including, Philips, General Electric, Gulf, IBM, Sterling and Westinghouse.

InfiniBand

In 2009, IBM announced a December 2009 release date for their DB2 pureScale offering, a shared-disk clustering scheme (inspired by parallel sysplex for DB2 z/OS) that uses a cluster of IBM System p servers (POWER6/7) communicating with each other over an InfiniBand interconnect.

Jean Calvignac

He had previously been responsible for system design of the ATM switching products, which he initiated with his team in 1992 at the IBM Laboratory in La Gaude, France.

Klaus Darga

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

M-Pesa

Development and second line support responsibilities were transferred to IBM in September 2009, to where most of the original Sagentia team transferred.

Media Key Block

The system was developed by big companies from the film industry and the electronics industry including IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Matsushita (Panasonic), Sony, Toshiba, The Walt Disney Company and Warner Bros.

Meedan

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.

Model M keyboard

These keyboards were produced by IBM in their plants in Lexington, Greenock and Guadalajara.

National champions

The risk involved with such policies is exemplified by the unsuccessful challenges to IBM’s dominance of the computer market by UK’s ICL,  France’s Bull,  and  Italy’s Olivetti during the 1970s.

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.

Office Open XML

The same InfoWorld article reported that IBM (which supports the ODF format) threatened to leave standards bodies that it said allow dominant corporations like Microsoft to wield undue influence.

Open Cluster Framework

Original supporters included several computing companies and groups, including Compaq, Conectiva, IBM, Linux-HA, MSC Software, the Open Source Development Lab, OSCAR, Red Hat, SGI and SUSE.

OpenAtom

OpenAtom has shown good scaling up to 20,480 processors of IBM's Blue Gene/L and 4,096 processors of Cray XT3.

OpenCrowd

Founded in 2005, it is headed by Sushil Prabhu as CEO, formerly CTO at Scient, with Bob Howe, founder of IBM’s consulting practice, and former CEO of Scient, serving as its Chairman.

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.

OpenPages

The OpenPages name continues to be applied to IBM's line of Governance, Risk, and Compliance products.

Panvidea

Their current partners include large CDNs, video platforms, enterprise IT provides, and broadcast technology vendors including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Akamai, Brightcove, Aspera, MainConcept, and IBM.

Peter G. Gyarmati

After their earlier work with Ferranti, then the successor ICL, in Manchester University he joined for research to IBM from 1972 until 1981, working in Poughkeepsie, Yorktown, New York, and the Delft University, the Netherlands.

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).

Richard Dubin

His clients have included IBM and Beth Israel Hospital/Harvard Medical School.

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.

Roberto Car

He was in 1973/74 a postdoc at the University of Milan, from 1977 to 1981 an assistant at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, from 1981 to 1983 at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center of IBM, from 1984 to 1990 associate professor for physics at SISSA in Trieste (in 1990/91 as full professor) and from 1991 to 1999 professor for physics at the University of Geneva (and director of the IRRMA of the ETH Lausanne).

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".

Soltis

Frank Soltis (born 1940), an American computer scientist, is IBM's Chief Scientist for the System i computers.

UTF-8

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

Van Wolverton

Wolverton has written other computer books, addressing MS-DOS, IBM OS/2, Microsoft Windows, WordPerfect, Netscape FastTrack, VisiCalc, QBasic and more.

Wallace John Eckert

A massive machine built to Eckert's specifications was built and installed behind glass at IBM's headquarters on Madison Avenue in January 1948.