IBM’s 100 Icons of Progress - FORTRAN The Pioneering Programming Language

 

From its creation in 1954, and its commercial release in 1957 as the progenitor of software, Fortran (FORmula TRANslator) became the first computer language standard, “helped open the door to modern computing,” and may well be the most influential software product in history. Fortran liberated computers from the exclusive realm of programmers and opened them to nearly everybody else. It is still in use more than 50 years after its creation.

For the first time, Fortran made code comprehensible to people with expertise in fields other than computing, opening programming to mathematicians and scientists. Someone who knew high school algebra but nothing about computers could probably figure out Fortran statements. Fortran began the process of abstracting software from the hardware on which it ran. Previous machine language programs had to be written for a specific computer, while a Fortran program could run on any system with a Fortran compiler.

What was formerly a laborious task of manually keying as many as 1,000 program instructions for a given problem could now be translated, automated and reduced to only 47 in Fortran.

The developer of the UNIX ^® operating system (Ken Thompson at Bell Labs in 1969) recalls that “95 percent of the people who programmed in the early years would never have done it without Fortran.” The program is, in essence, a compiler: A programmer using Fortran writes only 5 percent of all instructions, and the program generates (compiles) the remaining 95 percent for the computer.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, John Backus, the primary author of Fortran, assembled and guided a team of young men and women of diverse talents toward making computers more useful for their primary users—scientists and mathematicians. His process of aligning and integrating seemingly disparate talents and disciplines toward a specific goal—problem solving— was unprecedented. The team included engineers, a cryptographer, a chess wizard, programmers and mathematicians like Backus. “We were the hackers of those days,” team member Richard Goldberg recalled.

Backus understood that engineers needed a language to code their own problems. He chafed at what he considered “hand-to-hand combat” with the computer and its highly labor-intensive programming. Even though he was a programmer—a newly minted title even he didn’t understand at the time—Backus said he “didn’t like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early computer), writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.” It would be called “Speedcoding.”

“We thought it was a good project, and then everyone told us it couldn’t be done,” Backus recalled. “There was a sense that we really wanted to show them.”

Fortran was developed over three years, culminating in a debut presentation in February 1957 at the Western Joint Computer Conference in Los Angeles. In the Proceedings of that conference, the team’s presentation paper concluded succinctly, “The language of the system is intended to be capable of expressing virtually any numerical procedure.”

“It was ‘the turning point’ in computer software, much as the microprocessor was a giant step forward in hardware, according to J.A.N. Lee, a leading computer historian,” as reported in the New York Times.

“What Fortran did primarily was to mechanize the organization of loops,” said Backus. A loop, heavily used in scientific work and in computing payrolls, is a series of instructions repeated a number of times until a specific result is reached. As Backus wrote in a scientific paper in 1979, his team “went on to raise the question: ‘Can a machine translate a sufficiently rich mathematical language into a sufficiently economical program at a sufficiently low cost to make the whole affair feasible?’”

Management in many industries quickly realized the significance of Fortran for its ability to improve productivity by reducing the time and effort to write specific code applications. Banks began to use Fortran to build intensive number-crunching programs to assess risk, while insurance companies used it to create actuarial tables. And because other computer vendors made it available to run on their machines, using IBM’s standard, Fortran could cross operating platforms early in its history and established its durability.

In 1975, Backus was awarded the National Medal of Science. He was the first IBMer to receive this award. Two years later, he was awarded the equally prestigious Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. Backus was also awarded the Charles Stark Draper Prize by the National Academy of Engineering, the industry’s most esteemed prize.

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IBM’s 100 Icons of Progress - Rise of the Internet

 

In the span of a century, IBM has evolved from a small business that made scales, time clocks and tabulating machines to a globally integrated enterprise with 400,000 employees and a strong vision for the future. The stories that have emerged throughout our history are complex tales of big risks, lessons learned and discoveries that have transformed the way we work and live. These 100 iconic moments—these Icons of Progress—demonstrate our faith in science, our pursuit of knowledge and our belief that together we can make the world work better.

Rise of the Internet

In the late-1980s, IBM helped create a network of supercomputer centers dubbed NSFNET (the National Science Foundation Network), one of the first networks to use TCP/IP. The project essentially gave birth to the Internet—and business and life around the world changed forever. Before the Internet, scientists and researchers had to travel—often out of the country—for computing resources and to collaborate on major projects. By the early 1980s, an early Internet had begun to emerge: a primitive, regional telecommunications network linking several national laboratories and supercomputing centers that could be accessed only by trained experts. It was complicated, unfriendly and slow. But it was an important first step to the worldwide establishment of the Internet.

In 1985, the National Science Foundation (NSF) launched an initiative to build a state-of-the-art national backbone network, an inter-net, that would be based on transmission control protocol/Internet protocol (TCP/IP) and would link supercomputer centers and regional academic networks. TCP/IP is the telecommunications protocol framework developed by the U.S. Department of Defense in the 1970s, which became such a crucial part of the Internet’s plumbing. A number of universities and companies participated in its development, including IBM. Recognizing that much of this new network would have to be invented and lashed together, the NSF solicited proposals and awarded the project to IBM, MCI, the State of Michigan (home to a large community of computer scientists and keen to link up existing telecommunications networks within the state) and a consortium of universities in November 1987.

In the beginning, it was not clear if the NSFNET project could even be done. The award was met by the scientific community with skepticism, according to Hans-Werner Braun, co-principal of the project. The conventional thinking was that the task was technically undoable. But discussions among academics, government and industry began and IBMers were keenly interested. Al Weis and Barry Appleman from IBM Research and Bob Mazza, Walter Wiebe and Rick Boivie from IBM’s Academic Information Systems Division quickly engaged, offering hardware, software and project management. Senior leadership in the Research Division recognized the benefits of such a project: it was important to the nation, innovative technologies would be created and shared among the participants, and new business possibilities loomed—if this could be pulled off. Al Weis explained that before NSFNET, “IBM was unable to interconnect its large mainframes and some of its new workstations to all the research communities’ networks,” but this project held out the promise of fixing that problem.

The NSF liked the plan and authorized funding. IBM’s project manager, Harvey Fraser, recalled that “the team worked well because we had resources, executive time and the desire to make it a success.” In addition to creative attitudes, teaming and technologies, IBM, MCI and others brought the disciplines of business processes and project management to the effort, and a willingness on the part of everyone to work long hours. Some IBMers worked 100-hour weeks for months at a time.

IBM assembled a team from across the company, led initially by Jack Drescher, from Research Triangle Park Laboratory. They came up with the notion of creating a depot or assembly line, in the manner of Henry Ford, and a skunkworks atmosphere developed in Michigan where the project was headquartered. Equipment and parts flowed in from IBM and other companies, such as computers and peripheral gear, which they configured and tested then deployed to various campuses and super computer sites. "We turned the third floor of the Computer Center into an assembly line.… In the end we had the whole floor covered with parts and machines and boxes; it was a great way to deploy everything," remembers Elise Gerich who was the site liaison at the time. In fact, 150 systems with thousands of machines, parts and telco equipment were implemented. Eight months later, in July 1988, the network went live with 170 networks linked together, making it possible for the first time for the academic and research communities to access a high-speed, reliable and effective data network service that spanned the United States. The previous network, ARAPANET, was shut down soon after, since the new one worked so well.

Capacity became a problem almost immediately, requiring IBM and its partners to continue delivering more innovative technologies and equipment throughout 1989 and beyond. In IBM’s case, this often involved incorporating new networking capabilities into various software products, a process that led to the development of Internet-related software and consulting offerings over the next twenty years. In fact, that year alone traffic grew by 500 percent, beyond everyone’s wildest expectations. The big next step was moving the network to a T3 capable backbone (a new generation of higher speed digital switching) and along the way, using an IBM RS/6000 for each T3 node.

Traffic volume grew and grew. Back in 1988, only users in the US, France and Canada accessed the network. Between 1989 and 1993, ten to twelve additional countries were added each year, 21 in 1994 alone. By the time NSFNET was replaced with a newer generation backbone in 1995, 93 countries were hooked up. The network accelerated its response time and expanded capacity and functions as it migrated from T1 to T3 speeds and technologies. The project brought IBM squarely into the world of the Internet, exposing scientists, researchers, product developers and field organizations to new technologies and innovative uses of telecommunications. The NSF considers it one of its most valuable contributions to the nation: the forerunner of the modern Internet.

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IBM’s 100 Icons of Progress - Magnetic Stripe Technology

 

Some elements of everyday life are so deeply engrained that it’s hard to imagine how we coped before they existed. For many individuals born after 1970, that’s true of the magnetic stripe on credit and debit cards. People around the world swipe their cards through “mag stripe” readers more than 50 billion times a year. What they don’t realize is what a major shift this seemingly simple technology represented for retail, transportation and daily life.

As recently as the early 1970s, credit-card transactions were more physical than digital. Each one was recorded by using what was essentially a tiny printing press to imprint the raised letters and numbers from a card onto a two-sheet, pressure-sensitive paper form. One of those sheets was then sent to a processing center, where a harried clerk would type the account and sales information into a computing system. The system was insecure, slow and prone to error.

The magnetic stripe, when combined with point-of-sale devices, data networks and transaction-processing computers, was the catalyst that accelerated the proliferation of the global credit card industry, which now handles US$6 trillion in transactions per year. Initially used on transit tickets for the London underground and California’s Bay Area Rapid Transit system, the magnetic stripe enabled a person’s identifying information to be logged and transmitted immediately, securely and accurately. The technology is now commonplace on ID cards, drivers’ licenses, security control cards and ATM cards.

“Why has the mag stripe proved so resilient?” writes David S. Evans, co-author of the book Paying With Plastic: The Digital Revolution in Buying and Borrowing. “I think the answer is simple. It is really inexpensive to issue mag stripe cards, and nowadays the point-of-sale technology for reading mag stripes has been perfected and benefits from economies of learning and scale.”

The first person to affix magnetic media to a plastic card for data storage was IBM engineer Forrest Parry. This was back in the early 1960s. The story goes that he wanted to combine a strip of magnetized tape with a plastic identity card for officials of the CIA, and he couldn’t figure out how to do it. When he mentioned his problem to his wife, who happened to be ironing clothing at the time, she suggested that he use the iron to essentially melt the strip on. And that’s what he did. IBM became a pioneer in magnetic stripe technology.

The story of the magnetic stripe isn’t just about the ingenuity of the technology. Even more important was the effort by IBM and other leaders of electronic payments to create open compatibility standards. Working with the banking and airlines industries, IBM helped develop the approach that was adopted as a U.S. standard in 1969 and an international standard two years later. That meant that anybody could use their magnetic stripe credit or debit card anywhere in the world.

It also meant that IBM couldn’t benefit directly from its magnetic stripe inventions. “We decided not to patent the stripe or the stripe production technologies. We wanted everybody to use them,” says Jerome Svigals, IBM’s magnetic stripe project manager in the 1960s and early ‘70s. But IBM was compensated, just the same. “For every buck we spent on developing the mag stripe, we got [US]$1500 back in computer sales,” Svigals says. “Our motive was to drive computer sales, and we did.”

At first, banks were slow to adopt the magnetic stripe. Cost was a deterrent. IBM argued that prices would come down as production volumes increased. Svigals made a presentation to IBM’s board of directors, which included several bankers. He told them that IBM had no plan to get into the credit card business itself. It would just supply the technology. Svigals recalls that at the end of the meeting, then chief executive Thomas J. Watson Jr. took him aside and confided that he wasn’t totally comfortable with the magnetic stripe strategy. The reason: “Mom doesn’t like credit cards,” he confided. IBM got into the business anyway.

These days, in an increasingly instrumented and interconnected world, the job performed by magnetic stripes can be done in other ways. Cards embedded with microchips are rapidly replacing magnetic stripe cards in Europe and other developed economies. And mobile phones are poised to become another important means of making purchases. But the global financial and transaction systems into which they plug are in many ways a legacy of the humble magnetic stripe. One could say that the magnetic stripe did for consumers and travelers what the bar code and Universal Product Code (UPC) did for inventories and supply chains. Quite a legacy for Mrs. Parry’s ironing board.

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IBM’s 100 Icons of Progress - The Floppy Disk

 

In the span of a century, IBM has evolved from a small business that made scales, time clocks and tabulating machines to a globally integrated enterprise with 400,000 employees and a strong vision for the future. The stories that have emerged throughout our history are complex tales of big risks, lessons learned and discoveries that have transformed the way we work and live. These 100 iconic moments—these Icons of Progress—demonstrate our faith in science, our pursuit of knowledge and our belief that together we can make the world work better.

Check back. New stories will be added throughout IBM’s centennial year.

The floppy disk was once ubiquitous. More than five billion were sold per year worldwide at its peak in the mid-1990s. Now, the little plastic packages are a fast-fading memory. It has been widely reported that Sony, the last major floppy disk maker, will stop producing them in major markets this year. Today, the disks can be found mainly in the dusty bottoms of desk drawers and filing cabinets. Yet the floppy disk will go down as a singular advance in computing history. Floppies helped enable the PC revolution and the emergence of an independent software industry that now includes more than 10,000 companies. “It turned out to be one of the most influential product introductions ever in the industry,” says Jim Porter, a long-time disk drive analyst.

The floppy got its start at IBM’s data storage skunkworks in San Jose, California. In 1967, a small team of engineers under the leadership of David L. Noble started working on developing a reliable and inexpensive system for loading instructions and installing software updates into mainframe computers. The big machines were already equipped with hard disk drives, also invented by IBM engineers, but people used paper punched cards for data entry and software programming. The team considered using magnetic tape first, but then, in a project code-named “Minnow,” they switched to using a flexible Mylar disk coated with magnetic material that could be inserted through a slot into a disk drive mechanism and spun on a spindle. “I had no idea how important it would become and how widespread,” recalls Warren L. Dalziel, the lead inventor of the floppy disk drive.

The first floppies were 8-inch disks that were bare, but they got dirty easily, so the team packaged them in slim but durable envelopes equipped with an innovative dust-wiping element, making it possible to handle and store them easily. IBM began selling floppy disk drives in 1971, and received U.S. patents for the drive and floppy disk in 1972. In the early days, a single disk had the capacity of 3,000 punched cards, and IBM adapted its punched card data entry machines so their operators could easily shift from loading data on paper cards to putting it on the disks. In this way, the company sent into retirement the punched card, which had been a key to its success since its founding in 1911. It’s an example of IBM’s willingness over the years to obsolete its own technology when it discovers something that does the job better.

Fast-forward to the late 1970s. The first microcomputers used toggle switches and paper punched tape, a variant on the paper punched card, to install and store data. Later, people loaded software programs into their PCs using cassette tape recorders. The big storage breakthrough came in 1977 when Apple introduced the Apple II, its first mass-produced computer. It came with two 5-¼ inch floppy drives. George Sollman, a former executive of Shugart Associates, which had been started by IBMers, recalls showing Shugart’s new floppy drive to a meeting of the Homebrew Computing Club, of which Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were members. A few days later he was told there was a guy in the lobby of his office building who wanted to see him. “So I went out to the lobby and this guy was sitting there with holes in both knees. …. He had the most dark, intense eyes. He said, ‘I’ve got this thing we can build.’” It was Jobs. Shugart became Apple’s supplier of floppy disk drives.

Thanks to the advent of floppies, ordinary people were able to load operating systems and other software programs into their personal computers. The first IBM PC, sold in 1981, was available with two floppy drives. Users typically loaded an application in one drive and stored data on a diskette in the other.

This was a big advance in user-friendliness. But perhaps the greatest impact of the floppy wasn’t on individuals, but on the nature and structure of the IT industry. Up until the late 1970s, most software applications for tasks such as word processing and accounting were written by the personal computer owners themselves. But thanks to the floppy, companies could write programs, put them on the disks, and sell them through the mail or in stores. “It made it possible to have a software industry,” says Lee Felsenstein, a pioneer of the PC industry who designed the Osborne 1, the first mass-produced portable computer. Before networks became widely available for PCs, people used floppies to share programs and data with each other—calling it the “sneakernet.”

IBM made floppy disk drives for many years, and it continued to innovate. In 1984, it introduced the high density floppy disk for the PC, which could store 1.2 megabytes of data—capacious at the time. It produced the 3-½ inch floppy drives that became the mainstay of computing in the 1990s. Then, as the profit margins for floppy drives shrank, IBM got out of the business. But not before having again changed the business of technology.

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IBM`s Watson: 16 Things You May Not Know About Its Hardware Muscle

 

Watson—IBM’s Jeopardy-winning computer—showcased the refined capabilities of the computer giant’s technologically advanced, workload-optimized systems. During its three-night stretch on the TV game show, Watson ran on the latest IBM Power7technology, which can manage the most demanding applications, such as real-time analytics. While Watson’s QA (question-answering) technology was an IBM research breakthrough and will emerge into the market over time, Watson’s other IBM systems are commercially available and in use in companies worldwide today. For instance, the IBM Smart Analytics System contains components that are alive in Watson. The Smart Analytics System represents a high-performance, easy-to-maintain, component-based infrastructure that leverages pre-tuned and pre-integrated IBM hardware, software and storage capabilities to create business-changing insights. The IBM analytics “appliance” is but one of a wide variety of systems technologies that relate to Watson. This eWEEK slideshow takes a look at 16 things you may not know about the muscle behind Watson.

Power 750

Watson is powered by 10 racks of IBM Power 750 servers, all running the Linux operating system. The Power 750 is commercially available and is being used by customers around the world today.

Performance

Watson contains 15 terabytes of RAM and 2,870 processor cores. It can operate at 80 teraflops (80 trillion operations) per second.

Real Time

POWER7 has the computing power to process an enormous number of concurrent transactions and data while allowing for real-time analysis. This enables the massively parallel analytical capabilities Watson needs to match the speed at which Jeopardy contestants must decipher clues and provide accurate responses through analyzing subtle meaning, irony, riddles, and other complexities of natural language.

Data Store

The entire Watson data store resides in memory in order to achieve the sub-3-second response time needed for Jeopardy. The large memory support of Power systems enables the development of high-performance, workload-optimized applications. Watson was not connected to the Internet during Jeopardy—all the data was inside Watson, in memory.

Bandwidth

IBM's Power 750 servers have twice the amount of bandwidth than other commercially available systems, and include intelligent energy features that make Watson one of the most highly energy-efficient systems in its class.

Green Computing

To save energy, IBM's Power7 systems allow customers to power on and off various parts of the system or to dynamically increase or decrease processor clock speeds based on thermal conditions and system use. All that can be done on a single server or across a pool of multiple servers.

Energy Star

IBM’s Power7 systems are the first four-processor servers in the industry to qualify for the EPA’s Energy Star status. Energy Star is a U.S. government program that rates the energy efficiency of many products, including computers and other electronics.

Storage

Watson also includes IBM’s SONAS (Scale-out Network Attached Storage), a file system invented by IBM Research that in Watson includes a total of 21.6 terabytes of raw capacity. The actual size of the data Watson uses to generate answers is less than 1 TB.

Investment in Power

Over the past four years, IBM has invested $3.2 billion in Power systems, leading to a year-long rollout in 2010 of workload-optimized systems for the demands of emerging business models such as smart electrical grids, real-time analytics in financial markets and health care, mobile telecommunications and smarter traffic systems.

Tupperware

Retailer Tupperware Australia relies on Power7 for a Web-ordering system used by its 6,000-person sales force and 32 Australian and New Zealand distributors.

Other Power7 Customers

Financial customer GHY International, which offers customs brokerage services in the United States and Canada, and Russian pharmaceutical distributor Pro-Tek are both running on Power7 systems.

Education and Research

Rice University in Houston is using Power7 for a major cancer research project involving researchers working in locations around Texas. The system allows for multiple streams of information to be processed in real time so that teams of researchers in disparate locations are working off the latest information.

Data Explosion

IBM designed Power7 to meet the global data explosion. The amount of digital information that is being generated, stored, processed and analyzed each year is increasing at an exponential rate. IDC predicts that the total data volume will reach 35,000 exabytes in 2020, compared with 1,200 exabytes in 2010, representing a 29-fold increase in the next 10 years.

Many Cores

Power7 systems use more cores, or CPUs, and add more threads—or virtual cores, which are resources that manage computational tasks—per chip. Each new Power7 processor can now run 32 simultaneous tasks—with eight cores and four threads per core—quadruple the maximum number of cores of Power6 systems and eight times the number of threads per chip as Power6.

TurboCore

TurboCore mode, which is highly optimized for databases or other transaction-oriented workloads, provides more cache memory and memory bandwidth, and allows the clock speed of the chip to be increased. TurboCore mode can give financial benefit to customers, maximizing the return on investment from software by potentially cutting software costs in half for applications that are licensed per core, while increasing per-core performance of that software.

Intelligent Threads

Power7 technology features "Intelligent Threads" that can dynamically vary based on workload demand. With more threads, Power7 can deliver more total capacity as more tasks are accomplished in parallel, such as monitoring millions of individuals' household energy use by the minute in a smart grid.

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