IBM:

It was, when, 1890, that the US Census took more than 10 years to process one census that is supposed to happen each 10 years? So, US Census needed a better tool. Enter H. Hollerith who borrowed the idea of punched cards from, maybe, the Jacquard loom.

Tom Watson was with National Cash Register or some such, saw the Hollerith equipment, concluded that it was the
secret to automating routine business record keeping, especially accounting, and IBM was born.

Watson sold the heck out of his equipment. And he had
a team of good electro-mechanical engineers in
Poughkeepsie designing and building the equipment.
That takes us to about 1960. They made a lot of money.

About then, Tom Watson, Jr. visited Columbia University
and reported that there was a guy there
doing things, whatever, 200,000 times a second.

An IBM life insurance customer in NYC complained
that the IBM punched cards were taking up too much
room. So, some changes were needed, e.g.,
magnetic tape.

Due to US WWII work on vacuum tube digital computers
and pushed by Univac, IBM got into the computer business,
with magnetic tape, software, etc.

In the late 1950s Watson was told that he had
no research division and that to have a good one
he needed a leader good researchers would respect.
So, Watson got a chunk a land in Westchester County,
NY and hired Eero Saarinen to build him a fancy
research lab on a hill near Yorktown Heights.

By the mid 1960s, IBM had an idea, a line of
compatible computers called System 360 (the
origin of the IBM 'mainframe' computers). So,
a customer could start
with a cheap, small, slow System 360/20, 30, 40, etc. and
when ran out of capacity upgrade to a 360/50, 65, 85, 91,
95, etc. and just keep running the same software.

IBM regarded itself not as an electronics company
or a computer company but a marketing company.
The marketing/sales people had nearly all the power.

Here the focus was still on routine business record
keeping, 'business machines', and not general purpose
computing. IBM had some good work in general purpose
computing, but the executives stayed with their 'good IBM customers'. So, when MIT did Multics in 1969,
IBM was slow to respond. When DEC was selling good
general purpose
time sharing on the DEC 10, IBM was slow to respond.

As a means of a time-sharing computer
to be used for developing operating systems,
IBM Cambridge Scientific Center did
CP67/CMS for the IBM 360/67 virtual memory computer
of about 1967 and where CP67 was virtual machine.
Lots of people loved CP67/CMS, later VM/CMS,
but IBM's marketing people didn't want to sell it.
Internally, VM/CMS ran the company
through at least 1994. Also there was VNET,
roughly like the Internet except the
computers were also the routers --
did essentially of the IBM internal
computing through at least 1994. Use it?
Yes. Eagerly sell it? No. 'Dog fooding'? No.

In the 1970s,
IBM did move to System 370, a 'mainframe' which had virtual memory.
Customers wanted to do interactive, on-line
applications, and IBM responded slowly.
For the communications, IBM did
Systems Network Architecture, which
was about as flexible and easy to install as a railroad
and about as costly. IBM did notice that
with much in on-line activity, they could
sell a lot more System 370 computers and did.

IBM was slow to let the capacity of the 370
computers increase as quickly as customers
wanted, but by 1980 IBM had
a collection of faster boxes.
As 18 wheel trucks lined up to
receive these computers, the
line backed up to the
NYS Thruway, and there was a
blip in the US GDP.

A lot of IBM customers were doing
'personal productivity',
e.g., word processing and electronic
spreadsheets, on IBM's mainframe computers.

But that was 1980, and DEC,
Data General, Prime and others
were doing well. Prime
was a single board, bit-sliced,
virtual memory computer with
some extra register sets for
fast process switching
and a darned efficient time sharing
box, much more efficient, and much
easier to use, than anything from IBM.
And in 1980, Prime gave the best
ROI on the NYSE.

Also about here came the microprocessors,
e.g., Intel 8080 and 8086. Then
PCs began to explode. Then work
started moving off IBM's mainframes.
By 1986 or so, DEC was getting more
revenue from DuPont than IBM was.

There were well done IBM internal
reports on technology and markets
that outlined the future and the
threats to IBM's business, but
IBM's leadership, really successful
mainframe salesmen, essentially
ignored the reports.
The mainframe people had the
power and worked to kill off
anything else inside IBM.

At one time, IBM CEO Gerstner
said that "IBM is the most
arrogant,
inwardly directed,
process oriented
company I've every seen.".

By 1986, at an internal top management
meeting, it was possible to go around
the table and find that nearly no
one had made their projections.
The conclusion was that God
had ceased to smile on IBM.

IBM laughed at Intel and Microsoft,
and those two came to have by far
the last laugh.

For a while IBM's Cocke's
work on reduced instruction
set computing (RISC) gave IBM
an opportunity to grab the
high end desktop and workstation
markets, e.g., for finance,
engineering design, graphics,
but the mainframe people didn't
like the competition. E.g.,
when an IBM mainframe had a
processor clock of about 10 MHz,
Cocke's discrete component board
with RISC had a clock of 80 MHz.

Near 1994, IBM in three years
IBM lost $16 billion
and went from ~400,000 employees
down to ~200,000. The research
division phone book went from
4500 names down to 1500
with about 500 of those recent temporary
employees.

Then IBM pushed services,
e.g., they would run
your data center for you.

IBM bought companies with attractive products and put the
IBM marketing force behind those
products.

Net, the first and last 'visionary'
thing IBM did was to grab
Hollerith's work, although, of course,
it was Hollerith who was the real visionary.
Since then IBM has focused
on selling 'business machines' for
routine business record keeping
for large banks, insurance companies,
manufacturing companies,
and governments.
That's their 'market'.
They haven't tried very hard
to look for other markets.
In technology, IBM lets others
take the first steps and
maybe does something similar or
maybe just buys a company.
That's what they are still doing.

IBM had a lot of opportunities they
just dropped, apparently deliberately:

They could easily have had all of Cisco,
Intel, Microsoft, and Oracle. At one time, they
ran NSFNet, that is, the Internet;
had IBM stayed with that work, they could
have be running some huge fraction of all of
the Internet. IBM
was long a leader in laser printing,
e.g., for printing bank statements on
a roll of paper moved with a fork lift truck,
but
in the US HP made big bucks in that market. In the 1980s IBM saw the
need for video servers and had some working;
same for wearable computing. For the
Internet of things, IBM has long had the
TCP/IP stack on a chip. For relational database,
IBM invented it, roughly parallel to E. Wong's work
at Berkeley, but now the revenue for
relational database goes to, right, Oracle, etc.
IBM did early work on the tricky
'passive' amplifier wrap around an optical
fiber to amplify the digital signal
without converting from optical to
electrical; likely that amplifier is
crucial for the backbone of the Internet,
but IBM is not running that backbone;
maybe IBM is getting some patent license
revenue.
IBM did good, early
work on giant magneto resistive
disk heads and associated vertical
recording and long was the leader
in magnetic disk, but now people
buy hard disk drives from
Seagate, Western Digital, Maxtor, etc.
IBM did a lot of high end work on
large disk storage systems,
but people buy from EMC, build their own, etc.
It goes on and on: At one time or another,
IBM had in their lap the beginnings of nearly everything
we see today in information technology but
dropped it.

IBM remains focused on being a
'marketing' company, but now they
are a bit short on what to market.

Ah, yet another mainframe salesman
bites the dust.