Jeffery Winkler

IBM and the first computers

	Charles Flint was a daredevil 19th Century capitalist who flew airplanes, and sold 
weapons to both sides in the Russo-Japanese War. In 1910, he merged three companies 
together. They were International Time Recording Company, which made clocks, The 
Computing Scale Company of America, which made scales, and the Hollerith Electric 
Tabulating System, which was the possession of an eccentric inventor named Herman 
Hollerith, who invented a tabulating machine for conducting the 1890 census. These 
tabulating machines used punchcards like computers would decades later. Charles Flint 
called his new company "Computing-Tabulating-Recording" or "CTR". Flint was more 
interested in increasing the price of CTR stock than creating a viable business entity. He 
was planning to simply sell out at a high price. In 1913, Flint chose as his chief executive 
officer Thomas Watson, who had been at NCR which made cash registers. Watson 
reorganized how business was conducted at CTR and plowed profits back into the 
company. The company greatly expanded during World War I. In February 1924, CTR 
was renamed "International Business Machines", or "IBM". IBM grew tremendously in 
the 1920's when society was becoming more urban and modernized. In the 1930's, it 
didn't do to badly because the New Deal created legions of bureaucrats, all of whom 
needed business machines. Watson stressed research and development, and discarded 
parts of the company that didn't fit into his plans. Just before World War II, it was the 
leading firm in it's field. The people at IBM thought in terms of inventing new 
commercially viable products with existing technology as opposed to creating new 
technology. The most technologically advanced thing they produced was the electric 
typewriter which had been invented at the turn of the century although IBM figured out a 
cost effective way of mass producing them. If their purpose was to make money, why 
would they be concerned with something on the edge of human ability that wouldn't be 
commercially viable in the foreseeable future?
	This began to change when Watson had contact with academia while selling them 
a scantron machine. Then electrical engineer J. Presper Eckert worked with IBM to 
develop a calculator. Harvard mathematician Howard Aiken wanted to build a machine 
that could retain a set of mathematical rules and apply them to new data later. He needed 
money to do it. He was aware of how Eckert had used IBM, and this inspired him to do 
the same thing. A deal was worked out where IBM and Harvard  would work together to 
build a machine called Mark I. Work started on the project in 1940 with a $50,000 grant. 
It was finished in 1943. It was dismantled and shipped to Harvard for an official 
unveiling the following year. During the ceremony, Aiken acted like the machine was 
purely a Harvard creation and barely mentioned IBM at all. John Atanasoff, a physicist at 
Iowa State College, thought up a design for a fully electronic computer that would have 
much greater capacity and speed than Mark I. With the help of the army, John Mauchly 
and J. Presper Eckert built Atanasoff's machine. It was completed in 1946, and was 
called the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC. Watson was 
offended at having been snubbed at the unveiling of Mark I. Primarily to regain lost 
pride, IBM worked with Eckert and others at Columbia to produce an new computer 
called SSEC. At this time several computers were being developed by a variety of 
universities and corporations in the U.S. and Britain. The government had encouraged 
them to work together for the war effort. IBM emerged from World War II much more 
powerful than when the war began. Sales and rentals had quadrupled. This was despite 
the fact that Watson was an old man who didn't understand or care about computers. 
However in 1949 Watson's son Watson Jr. came to power and recognized the potential of 
these behemoth machines. He produced the 701 which was more powerful than SSEC. At 
this time IBM was about two years behind Remington Band in the development of 
computers. In the early 1950's, Watson Jr. started the ambitious 700 series, and was 
committed to producing machines for commercial markets.