The History of IBM: Part 3

the heavens, Mrs Sakamoto, you're beautiful. You know. I'm really glad that Jonathan is decided to switch to song quotes instead of movie quotes, because with three podcasts on IBM and yes we're stopping at three, he probably would have been tempted to quote Tron five or six more times, or war games game would have gone back and forth between those two. It was possibly hackers. That's another good one.

It was just funny because I didn't realize that you had quoted Tron so frequently into like, like you quote a Tron an episode blah blah blah. Also in the in six episodes later you did again, and in three episodes later again you really liked Tron. Yeah, I think he listed forty one total quotes and and maybe three or four of them were from Tron. Yeah, that was not on purpose because I didn't keep track of them. Was a recap in case you're listening, in case you're

just tuning in. IBM was founded and it did a lot of stuff. Yes, and we decided to do three podcasts on IBM because someone we we've had people ask us about the history of of IBM. We we talked about the history of different commuting companies because uh tech stuff isn't really about reviews, it's about technology and people. Yes, and uh so we're sort of fascinated by how these machines got into our lives, and we thought, oh yeah,

let's let's do a podcast at IBM. And then we started researching it and found out you can't do a podcast about IBM unless it's several hours long writ and we just don't have that kind of stamina. Uh So, although some of you kind of get peeved with us when we do more than one podcast that at time on stuff, we decided to do allur research at one time, and thank you for sticking with us, because we've finally gotten too. They've done so much innovation up into the

point we're reaching today. I mean, they've they've done mainframe computers. They've they've introduced programming languages, they've helped the space program, they've helped the military, they've introduced this electric typewriter. Yeah yeah, well, I mean there were a business machine company, so UM they were very interested in all kinds of processing and and helping people do work. Yes, So at this point they're really going to change the work landscape because they're

going to introduce a machine that will affect everyone's productivity. Yeah, so we're we've we've covered IBMS history all the way up to nineteen eighty one so far, stopping well, stopping at nineteen eighty right where we're going to pick up, and keep in mind that the companies that formed IBM actually date all the way back to the eighteen the late eighteen hundreds. Right at the point at which IBM was founded. There were three companies that were brought together

as a business venture. There was m Herman hollerwas Tabulating Machine company, which is really what's left of IBM today is a computing company. There was also a time recording company, which the IBM divested itself, UM and UH Computing Scale Company Computing divested itself of and all and and those other two companies, the companies that they sold those branches are all surviving today. So all three were successful. So

they were talking. When you're talking about this a company that's nearly a century old, of course you're gonna have a lot of stuff to cover. Well. In one they started to forge new ground. Now not entirely new in the sense that there were other competitors on the market in but it was the personal computer era. IBM at this point had not entered the personal computer era. Its

focus was, as Chris was saying, on businesses. Yeah, we talked about the system's stroke three sixty and three seventy, which were uh innovative because they weren't just the giant room filling mainframes. They were modular computers that could be added onto and part of that equipment including included terminals UM and before UH, in the in the fifties and sixties, there were machines that basically had lights and switches, and you know, before the displays came on the scene, you

couldn't really figure out specifically what you were doing. We we talked about this in a previous episode a long time ago, about programming, and they would take a bunch of punched cards and bring them into the machine, and you couldn't really tell whether the machine was gonna do what you wanted it to do until it read through all the punch cards and then the lights, the appropriate lights flickered on or off, right, and you would then know whether or not the program you had designed worked.

And if it didn't work, you had to go back and go card by card and figure out where the bugs were in that system and then reprogrammed. And this

just took a long time. So, um, you know, there were and and this isn't to say that IBM is the only company and innovating in the computer space, um during this time, but these are these systems were not you know, they had terminals at this point and they were starting to become uh more useful, but they were using a central computer CPU rather than you know what

we think of today. Right, All these different terminals were tapping into the same centralized brain, if you if you will, and so you can think of it as like UM time sharing. Right. Often you would have time sharing systems where a terminal would be able to access the computer's processing power. But the more terminals you add, the more you had to divide that up. You couldn't give everyone unfettered access all the time. Instead, you would have a

system that would schedule when you could access the core. Now, this would go really fast, so to most people would seem instantaneous unless there was an unusually heavy load on the system. Um. But in effect, you've got someone controlling all the traffic. Well, let's let's talk about personal computers. Now. We started seeing the personal computer market developed in the seventies. Yes, and it was with computers like the al Tear, the Altar. Now, the al Tear didn't have a monitor, um, but the

TRS eight did. Yeah, that was Tandy's machine. So many of us remember that had used the floppy disks that we talked about in the last episode, which were an IBM innovation. You had. You had an upstart computer company called Apple that was starting to Yeah, I know, it's hard to believe that a computer company we called Apple. And then there's another computing company you might have heard of that came out with the Atrip computers. Um, you had the Common War sixty four coming out in the

early the late seven these early eighties. Um, you had all these different companies getting into it. Well, IBM, here you have this this old technology company that has an incredible history with computing. They get into the market in nineteen eighty one, they introduced the fifty one fifty personal computer. I. Yes. Now, if you wonder why we call them PCs or personal computers, this is why. Yeah, it's um. They they were using off the shelf components to build this machine. They used

Intel's eight to sixteen bit eight eight eight processor Classic. Yeah, they were looking at that there. They were also looking at the possibility of using a Motorola processor or the eight six from Intel. But they determined that those processors were actually too powerful for a personal computer. It wasn't necessary to have that kind of processing power. That's kind

of funny in it. Yeah. Well, you still to this day have companies that will say, you know what, we don't need to put that powerful processor into this machine. Sometimes it's not just because you know, it's not that they're trying to to mess with the consumer. It's because they'll say, well, if we put in this powerful chip, that means we have to figure out how do we keep it cool? Right right? Well, that's that's evident in laptops. Yeah, that's and that's also evident in lower cost machine. If

you don't held devices exactly exactly what I mean. If you go to a computer store and you go, hey, that one's only three you know I could get that computer and I have a computer for three hundred dollars, It's like, yes, you will, and it will have a slower, less powerful processor. So when they were looking at the

who would provide the operating system for this machine? They first went to a company called Digital Research and they said, hey, you guys want to give us the operating system or you want to partner with us and provide the operating system for a new personal computer. And they said no. So they went to a different upstart computer company, a company that started right around the same time as Apple in fact, and had co founders who were also shared

quite a few uh qualities with the Apple co founders. Yes, yes, as a matter of fact, I think we may have done a podcast on these guys. We may have. Actually, memory does there is a bell ringing somewhere. That might be a fire drill or an angels getting its wings. It could be Actually you're probably thinking of the disc

operating system. Yes, Microsoft disc operating system. Now Microsoft got this operating system originally from Seattle Computer Products, and uh, Seattle Computer Products had an operating system called q DOSS, which do you know the at least the semi apocryphal name that q DOSS actually refers to this. This may or may not be true. It's one of those things that people hold as true, but there's no actual proof.

Q DOSS stands for Quick and Dirty Operating System. So you've got this, uh, and this was a line command operating system, right, you would type commands into your on your keyboard and look at the display to figure out, you know, to to actually execute stuff. Um. So Microsoft buys q DOSS and then adapts it into an operating system they called PC doss, and then later they renamed it MS DOSS for Microsoft. Oh so let's talk a little bit about the fifty one fifty. This was not

a lightweight machine. It weighed approximately twenty five pounds. Well, it's lighter than the system slash three sixty. Well yeah, and I don't actually know that. I'm just taking an educated guess. You didn't need a hand truck to move it into your office, so there there was a benefit there, right, But it wasn't exactly you know, it wasn't a portable system. Um, the processor speed on the fifty one fifty was four

point seven seven mega hurts. That's mega hurts. Guys. You know you have gigga hurts processors like my my phone has a giga hurts processor. So that's you know, my phone is way more powerful as far as the processing standpoint is concerned than the old of course, you know that was so the CPU had about twenty nine thousand transistors on it would sounds like a lot, except now we're approaching for the consumer market. We are now approaching

one billion transistors on a single processor. Yes, there's a lot more than twenty nine thousand. That also shows the the whole concept of exponential growth with Moore's law. We've talked about it a lot, and you know it's hard to imagine what that really means until you think, all right, we're talking two thousand eleven now and we're approaching a billion transistors back there were just twenty nine thousand. That's

that's crazy. Um, the you could get the system for if you wanted a bare bones system, you could have sixteen kilobytes of RAM. It was expandable up to two hundred and fifty six kilobytes again kilobytes. Uh. Then you had fortes of ROM read only memory. Uh, and you could have up to two five and a quarter inch disk drives. Man, do you remember the five and a

quarter inch discs? You do? I'm sure? All right. So guys, if you are um, if you're one of our younger listeners, we got a lot of you out there, five and a quarter inch discs. You may have seen these in books or on television, or on movies, or or or maybe you've stumbled across an ancient computer burial mound and you've found some. But the five and a quarter inch discs were these black uh disksmayed out of a very thin plastic. Some people thought that's why they were called

floppy disks, because you could actually fold them up. And that I even remember when I was a kid people mistakenly identifying three and a half inch discs as hard disks because they were made a little a hard plastic the outside. That's not that's not true. Inside sloppy. Yeah, so you had this very flexible material inside. Yeah, you weren't supposed to mess with them too much because they could be easily damaged. But that was the storage media

these UH devices used. The original UH did not have a hard drive, It only had the disk drives UM and had a monochromatic display. That means, of course, that the computer screen could only show one color, which was not the you know Apple too. We went with green. It was like a dark green. The IBM was more of a white. UH. I remember that being thrown by that when I got when we got our first IBM computer, it also could come UH. There was an option to get a cassette drive with it, so you would use

a cassette to store information as opposed to the floppy drive. Now, the cheapest one of the fifties, the one with the sixteen kilobytes around, cost about one thousand, five hundred sixty five bucks, which today would be around three thousand, seven four dollars. Little pricing, little pricing. The if you wanted to trick it out, like you wanted to get the glow and the dark stuff and you know the hemp

and base yeah himmy in there. No. No, if you wanted the two hundred six kilobytes a RAM, you've got the two disk drives, you've got all of that stuff, then you're talking six thousand dollars, which today is over fourteen thousand bucks. Yes for a computer. Fourteen dollars for a computer. And keep in mind you can't climb into this computer and have it drive you places, because I think for teen dollars that should be able to transport

you beyond in your mind. Yeah. Also, I note about about UM A lot of people not really sold on it being Van Halen's best album. Nice I can't drive fifty five um, actually I can't drive at all. So the the software that you can get back in those days included stuff like the Visit couc spreadsheet. I remember Visit and easy Writer one point zero easy Writer not Writer UM and different. And also there was an incredible game, Really Adventure, Yes Microsoft Adventure. I was back in the

old fifty days. So yeah, you could pick these up in um sears or computer Land computer stores at the time. That's where those were the outlets that were carrying it. And this created a PC compatible market. When you if you ever heard the term PC compatible or IBM compatible, let's talk about other companies that made computers that ran on using the same components as the IBM computers, which meant that you could run the same programs that IBM

computers could run. Yes, and this has a lot to do with the market share that Windows has today, yes versus Apple's market share. Yeah, you might ask yourself, why is it that when you walk into a typical office you'll see more often than not, you'll see Windows machines everywhere and only a few max, if any max at all. I would argue there are two major reasons. Pray, hit me up with those reasons you um. First of all is that IBM was willing to license this architecture to

other companies. So there were clones. Yes, you could send them in if you like. Thus the IBM compatibles right exactly. And Apple specifically did not want to do that. Yeah, they experimented it with it for a while when Steve Jobs was kind of pushed out of the company and it did not go well. And when Steve Jobs came back that ended too to sweet. And if you want to write in and argue that you may, because there are people who will argue that it was starting to

take off with but yeah, I mean it wasn't. It wasn't an immediate change, and it was way way after this point. This point is where IBM had established itself in the marketplace. But the other thing that I think significantly contributed to this is marketing because IBM, as we have touched on in two podcasts already, is to some degree, well it's in their name business machines. They're synonymous with

computing power for companies. Yes, they had they had a longstanding reputation as being the company to go to for your technology needs if you were a business and people, even though they were available at sears and other outlets, people didn't buy these machines for their homes for the most part. Now small business owners started to pick them up. Business owners were buying them, small business owners, larger business owners. Uh they were. They were gobbling them up to use

at work for work stuff. You didn't have people buying gaming PCs because they're dining games out there. That yeah, if you were buying games, you were buying them honestly the very early days of computer games. Can you remember these days where you would go into a computer store and there'd be a bulletin board, a cork bulletin board, and up there you would see penned their little plastic bags that would contain a disk and a sheet of instructions and that was what computer games looked like on

the earliest days. Yeah, I remember those days. That was before you know you really we could all do a discussion about the how how computer games evolved. From a marketing standpoint, it would actually be pretty fascinating because, like I said, those early days, you would go in and it would be it might even be a local programmer who built that game and then just copied it onto as many discs as he or she could, and then contacted, say a hobby store, and sold them through the hobby store.

Later on you would get into the more the larger distributing models of companies forming around creating video games. I think Richard Garriott was one of the first people to really demand that his games be packaged in a box as opposed to in a in a ziplock bag. But getting back to the the the IBM, the personal computer. Yeah, it really did well in small business and large business markets.

It started to pick up in the home market as well for more affluent people obviously, because you know, asking folks to to drop dollars on a computer, that's a lot of money, even if even if you were just saying fifteen hundred dollars today, without taking inflation into account, that's still a lot of money to ask for a computer. Well, yeah, people people complain about that all the time, about computers that cost more than a thousand dollars. I see that

all the time. Well, that's just too much. Well, and it's why, it's why some people think of Apple as being a boutique computer system as opposed to, you know, a personal computer that you would normally think of. People think of Apples being almost a laitist because the products are more expensive. Although you could also just just as easily argue, well, you're paying for quality. You know, you're

paying for the quality of the parts in there. And because the computer market on the PC side is more piecemeal that you can put together computers based upon whatever off the shelf components are out there that you also are you know, just just as the parts come from all different parts of the world. Uh, the quality spans the entire spectrum between really awesome computers and really really kind of not so awesome, crappy machines. Well, something that

was there was something holding it back. What's that? That would be the operating system you were just talking about, Because doss is not necessarily user friendly. It can be willing to learn. I actually I was. I was a Doss fanboy, and that I had bothered to learn all the commands, and it was it came naturally to me. Granted I was learning TOSS in that time of my life when I was when that the language centers in

my brain were really receptive to stuff. If I were trying to learn it today, I'd be like, what the heck this is? Give me, give me a graphic user interface. This I can't know. Uh, the around the room right right, or I throw the machine across the floor. I mean I really six on one, half a dozen on the other. Well, yeah, the you know later on in the eighties and the early in the early mid eighties. Um, now, and then we gonna just give a year, I would say, I

would say eighty four. But yeah, I mean the the PC was out for a couple of years before Apple's Macintosh at the scene, before the Amiga hit the scene. Uh, Commodores Amiga, before uh the Atar e s T hit the scene. With graphical user interfaces. Yeah, the Xerox had been working on in the graphic interface. Yeah, that was back in the seventies actually before but they weren't on these devices. No, the personal computers were all these line based UM. You would actually type commands in to make

things happen U. Yeah. IBM released the personal computer XT, which provided more memory. It also introduced the dual sided diskette drive UM and it had a fixed desk drive which we now really referred to as a hard drive UM. And they also introduced a color printer. And personally in the business side, IBM was also uh doing things with

personal banking machines and robotic systems. They were working they While we're talking about personal computers, keep in mind IBM on the on on their research and development side, they haven't stopped. They're still pouring lots of money and time and effort into research and development. They're coming up with really cool stuff. We're mostly focusing on the personal computers for this podcast, but that doesn't mean that that was

where IBM's entire focus lay at the time. Yeah. Definitely if you're interested in learning all the stuff that they were doing as time and it is rather fascinating. If you like computer history, the Computer History Museum and IBMS archives are great free places to look for information on that. And we're we're skimming over some of that except for the some of the really interesting tidbits on company culture

and things. But I'm glad that you left one of the things off once that happened in Remember we were just talking a minute ago about how personal computers were mostly for businesses at this point. UM I would argue maybe except for really hardcore computer enthusiasts, and we had quite a few of those from dating from the sixties

and seventies into the eighties. They came out with IBM decided to come out with a computer that was really designed to be an affordable in home computer, and they called it the PC Junior, also known as you remember its nickname, the Peanut, and they had this is a period of time, and this enabled Apple to get a foothold with some people. This is a period of time

when IBM the coolest commercials. I remember this growing up, where they had the Charlie Chaplin impersonator person talking about the PC and the PC Junior and how easy the PC Junior was to to use. And now I remember it had a little chicklate keyboard, which was kind of common on the less expensive computers where had the little rubberized keys the thing bombed, but not again people right in and say, no, it didn't. It's they sold a lot of them, but it just wasn't what the PC was.

And you know, it was a good entry into the home market, I would say, but not what you would think of as a really successful product launch now and it's it's it's flaws were obvious enough to a lot of people that people ridiculed. It's sort of like Microsoft, Bob. So let's talk about for a second. This is a big year in personal computing in general. Right, we're not talking about van Halen Halen albums again. Though, we're not

talking about van Halen albums again. Although four I wore it down, might as well jump um which ironically before Yeah, so eight four rolls around and then um, you may have seen the infamous commercial that aired during the Super Bowl in four, the Apple commercial that was for the Apple mac computer Macintosh. I should say it was the full name Apple Macintosh. Yes, we think of it now as the Mac Classic, the all in one, little black and white box. UM that used the motor rolla processor.

Um and uh, actually you know what, we I think we've left that out because in two IBM actually took a stake and Intel, Um, this is where it gets they start sort of crossing over because um, the Macintosh they were for their marketing, they were pointing out that it was a it had a g u I graphical user interface, gooey. Um. It was easier to use, they were saying, than the IBM PC because look at all

these books that Charlie Chaplin wants you to read. Um. Well, and their commercial made it look like IBM was this Orwellian big brother organization and what they were doing huge, They were huge company. Yeah. They were playing up the fact that IBM had this this hundred year old history, nearly a hundred year old history exact, that it was permeating all aspects of business, that they were dominating, and

that they were oppressive. They were essentially turning IBM's reputation against IBM exactly and said, what about the rebels, what about the people who don't want to conform, who don't want to just march in step with everyone else, here's the machine for you, Apple Macintosh. Ironically, now those people are using. If you're marketing to that group of people, you're talking Linux. Yeah. Yeah, Because because Apple ended up saying, hey, you know that Orwellian thing. We do it way better

than IBM never did. UM. It's little commentary from Jonathan well And and not completely unwarranted because Apple is known for having closed off system. Again, their advantages and disadvantage. We've talked about this countless times in the podcast. Their advantages and disadvantages to both options. But so in this case it's sort of ironic. Yeah, and so that really stepped up this, uh, this competition between IBM and and Apple.

IBM nine four introduced the PC a T, which the that was the most powerful personal computer at that time. And also they started to introduce the PC network, which was a system that allowed customers to link up to seventy two PCs together. So this is the precursor really of a local area network UM. And it showed that IBM was already thinking ahead, excuse me, ahead to these systems that would allow consumers and and businesses really to

create a collaborative environment. Just as a historical note, of course, darpnet already exists at this point. It had been created for government use back in the UH the sixties and seventies really UM, and then of course for educational institutions. But again, it's not something that the average person uses like it like he or she does today. Computer networks

were pretty rare. You would usually only find them in proprietary systems, so you would have this and and a lot of them were more like time sharing systems where you had terminals that tapped into a centralized computer. It wasn't a true network in the sense of each each outlet is its own computer that then communicates with other

computers on the system. Right. Ethernet was invented in the early seventies, but you wouldn't find an Ethernet port on an IBM PC introduced in just those technologies took a while to come together. Right, So do you do you happen to know what kind of processor the A T had on it? No, I don't. The eighty two eight six the to A A D six processor from Intel. It had it actually up the speed. Remember the old speed of the PC was four of the processor speed

was four point seven seven Mega hurts. The two six boosted that to six mega hurts, so it was a more powerful processor. The two six was also the first IBM machine that my family owned, IBM two eight six um and now we can we can start skipping ahead some we we've spent a good amount of time. Do you have something specific you wanted to point out? Um, Since since we've been focusing primarily on the computers, I wanted to note a couple again kind of interesting things.

In eighty three, um IBM was using scandaling tunneling microscopy, yes, for to create three dimensional images of on of the atomic surfaces of gold, silicon, nickel, and other solids. Which is just an interesting note that they were working on this kind of technology, but at that scale. Again, these are the laying the foundations for tiny little processors for stuff on the nano scale. Again, this is gonna happen. They're also gonna play with development that scanning tunneling microscope

in just a few years to do something clever. So we'll talk about that in just a second. Yeah. So in night they IBM introduces the first computer running on the three six processor, and in nine they are the first computer company to use intels for eighty six processor, although it would be a couple of years before that would hit the actual consumer market. They introduced Prodigy. Oh wait, wait a minute, wait eighty nine Because I was going to uh, I saw one other thing I wanted to mention.

Oh all right, well, m that's a storage thing. Okay, did you notice that they there's so much information at this point I was skiing skimming to be honest, so much per year. Yeah, that's the thing. IBM a so big by the late eighties that it has multiple divisions, it's got presents worldwide. They got scientists, uh you know, packed in like Sartain may have R and D centers all over the place. Well, some some scientists and engineers were able to set a new world record in magnetic storage.

They were able to store a billion bits of information on a single square inch of disk space a gig a bit. That's pretty impressive. And I'm sure that amount of storage costs you a lot of money compared to how much it would cost now. All right, So getting back to Prodigy, Prodigy was essentially an online service provider type of service. You could log in and go shopping

on it, or you could read the latest news. So it's kind of a precursor to the Internet, right, Yeah, and so OSP we were talking about, uh, we talked about online service providers a long time ago. So things like all L and Prodigy both kind of had had their their roots in that, but in ninety they also there was also an interesting development. We you talked about the scanning tunneling microscope. That's when scientists began to use it to manipulate individual atoms. Yes, so you work at IBM.

You're a why this is a mena? This is just hypothetical case. Hypothetically, I got it. It's you're a scientist, you work for IBM. You have just figured out how to manipulate individual atoms. What do you do with that knowledge? I don't know? And you know, create world peace, solve the hunger problem. That's so wrong. That's when I use the scanning scanning tunneling microscope to arrange atoms so that

they spell out the letters IBM on the atomic scale. Yeah, okay, that sounds like this sounds like I've been kind of eat this. This was actually pretty cool. And there are pictures We've talked about this before on the podcast, but there are pictures on the web of IBM spelled out in individual atoms and they were all pushed around by a scanning tunneling microscope. Yes, and the nineties were actually

sort of a difficult period for IBM, and in several ways. Yeah, they tried to introduce the PC radio in nine, which was a battery powered mobile computer and it could actually

transmit data via radio or telephone or cellular communication. The idea here was that IBM was trying to make computers that people who had to go out on service calls or who had to be remote from a centralized location could still use a computer system without having to just you know, save up all the data and wait till you got back to the office to to type everything up. But you know that it was again a precursor to the mobile computers of today, but didn't do incredibly well.

They also introduced the PS two L forty s X. Do you know what that was the very first I b M laptop. Oh, it was enormous, Yes it was. It was technically portable, so was the first Apple. All right, that was technically portable, but um but yeah, I wouldn't recommend carrying it for very long. Uh. And it could hold a head up to eighteen megabytes of memory and an internal modem that worked at and a facts modem

that could go up to um. So it was you know, it was meant for people who did a lot of business travel UH and needed to have a computer with them when they traveled around, the same reason why we have laptops today. Really, it's just that it was a little bulkier back then, little boxier, a little heavier, significantly heavier. Yeah yeah, yeah, but um yeah, there are there are

a lot of things going on here too, UM OS two. Yes, OS two, We didn't really we didn't really talking about the O s because that was more of a Most people operated with the DOSS system. You could get UH business operating system, the same one that was running on IBM's business computers, but those tended to be more expensive and a lot of people just opted for the less

expensive MS DOSS version. So in addition to OS two UM, IBM is also working in a partnership with Motorola to create reduced instruction set computing chips the power PC chips which were in Macintosh computers in the late UH in the late nineties, UM which replaced the Motorola sixty eight thousand series ships that used in the in the eighties

and early nineties. You know, Intel, even though they had a stake in Intel for a while, they were using the complex and instruction set computing, so you have their competing on computing with Intel and the on the processors

they're competing and operating systems with Windows. This is a difficult time for IBM because they're having struggles where you know, they've they've been the dominant player in the market for so long, but Intel came along, Apples come along, and Microsoft has come along, and these guys are not going away. And you've got all these computers now that are out there that are based on this IBM architecture. So IBM branded computers aren't necessarily the top dog anymore. Right, You've

got all the you've got all these different options. If you want a PC, like a Microsoft, a PC that's running Microsoft operating system, you don't have to buy it from IBM. And right, So IBM kind of got out of that game a little bit, even to the point where their think Pad line, which was their notebook line, they ended up licensing out to Lenovo. Yeah, they essentially divested themselves of the personal computer business more or less

when they decided to let Lenovo take that over. And I think a lot of people, myself included, were a little taken aback by that. Yeah, because he said IBM getting out of the personal computer business. Well, we've got to remember that Chris and I grew up in a time where IBM was almost synonymous with personal computers. In fact, that's what we really knew them for anyway, because we were too young to be using the business stuff apart from this electric typewriter. UM. So for us, IBM meant

personal computers. So when they got out of it, you're like, what else do they do? And then you start looking into and oh everything, then that makes sense. Um. You know, they introduced a lot of stuff in the nineties too.

They introduced the three and a half inch disk drive. Uh. They also Uh in the nineties, there was a big, big thing that that made the news worldwide, which was the infamous match between Deep Blue and Gary Kasparov, the chess champion will Deep Blue was an IBM computer named because ibm s color is blue, they're known as Big Blue. So Deep Blue went up against Kasparov on the first series of games. Kasparov came out the winner, but there was a rematch and Deep Blue ended up defeating Kasparov.

And this kind of showed ibm s um work into developing artificial intelligence computer processing ability. Uh, all those sort of things, and it's it's work that IBM continues to this day. The Watson computer is another example of that, where they've put their thought together about how can we create a machine that understands semantics, that can can decide upon an answer based upon the probability that it's the

correct one. How can it judge between various responses to a query and pick the one that's the most appropriate. These are not small challenges, and it's the sort of stuff that IBM Research and Development concentrates on. Now it's the stuff that drives our technology to the next level. So it's it's stuff that we may not see in the consumer market for years and years, but it's it's the pioneering work that's necessary for us to move forward. Yeah, definitely,

definitely so. And you know, ib i'm never really got out of the business of making very large computing UH hardware for organizations of all kinds. It's about to say businesses, but really, you know, all sorts of organizations because that kind of equipment is necessary for computing high end projects. You know, even still doing today doing Herman Hollerith's work of tabulating data um. You know, they for a long time they they have uh, participated in calculating results for

the Olympics. Uh, all kinds of projects, the census on and off. Um, you know, just amazing stuff. And you don't really these are things that you don't see like you do the computer on your desktop. Um. But it's it's certainly true that IBM is still a dominant player in in the industry. And even as we touched on in the last episode, the uh, the subtle advances they

were making in the ability for computers to recognize human speech. UM. You know, we were kind of chuckling about it because it was it was years before Watson ever made its appearance on Jeopardy, decades really, but it was able to you know, there was a device that he came up with. It could have a thousand word vocabulary and could transcribe speech within you know, accuracy rate. That's you know, these things, these little steps add up to big advances in computing

in just more than a hundred years. I think I can sum that up with that's one small step for an international business machines company, one giant leap for me. Let's wrap this up, shall we. We We have talked about IBM for three podcasts and now we are done for the time being, four if you count the Watson podcast. Um So, guys, this was really fascinating for for us on our end, We really enjoyed being able to dive down and and look at the rich history of this company.

If you have any companies you think we should concentrate on next, well, not immediately next, We're gonna take a break from the business side for a little bit and we'll have a few other episodes that relate to other stuff. But if there's an other company you think that we should treat with this sort of this sort of in depth coverage, let us know. You can let us know

on Twitter or Facebook are handled. There is tech Stuff hs W or you can shoot us an email and that address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com and Chris and I will talk to you again really soon. For moralness and thousands of other topics. Visit how stuff works dot com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The How Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes. Brought to you by the

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