X-Nico

unusual facts about International Business Machines



Darl McBride

On March 7, 2003, during McBride's tenure as CEO of the company, The SCO Group initiated litigation (SCO v. IBM) against IBM, alleging breach of contract and copyright infringement claims connected to Unix.

History of the floppy disk

In 1967, IBM gave their San Jose, California storage development center a task to develop a reliable and inexpensive system for loading microcode into their System/370 mainframes in a process called Initial Control Program Load (ICPL).

IBM Business System 12

Business System 12, or simply BS12, was one of the first fully relational database management systems, designed and implemented by IBM's Bureau Service subsidiary at the company's international development centre in Uithoorn, Netherlands.

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.

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.

Kendall Square Research

KSR's competitors included Thinking Machines, Meiko Scientific, and various old-line (and still surviving) companies like IBM, Intel, and Sun Microsystems.

Mode X

Mode X is an alternative video graphics display mode of the IBM VGA graphics hardware that was popularized by Michael Abrash, first published in July 1991 in Dr. Dobb's Journal, republished in chapters 47-49 of Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book (now freely available online).

Ravi Gomatam

He then moved to the USA and worked as a freelance consultant for a number of Fortune-500 companies including General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Burroughs and IBM in the areas of operating system design, data communications and very-large database design.

Spoken English Corpus

The Spoken English Corpus (SEC) is a speech corpus used in corpus linguistics consisting of a collection of recordings of spoken British English compiled during the period 1984-7 through a collaboration, funded by IBM, between the Unit for Computer Research on the English Language (UCREL) at the University of Lancaster and the IBM Scientific Centre in Winchester.

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.

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.


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