War Crimes and Imperial Fantasies MIT was working hard with government research funds to reduce computers to something small enough so you could sell it to a company as a mainframe. Meanwhile, IBM was in there learning, on public funds, how to move from punch cards to computers. They were doing it for the National Security Agency and other government agencies. When Alan Greenspan talks about it, it’s the marvels of entrepreneurial initiative and consumer choice, which was approximately zero throughout the costly and risky period of development. (Sep. 2004 Noam Chomsky on sophists.org)

Poughkeepsie engineer earns honor Audrey Helffrich has been awarded an IBM Fellow designation. Helffrich led the hardware strategy for IBM's risky early 1990s transition from bipolar to CMOS processors on its biggest computers, the mainframes made at Poughkeepsie. That transition helped save the mainframe and keep the Poughkeepsie site alive. (Jun. 2004 Poughkeepsie Journal)

Fifty years of IBM innovation with information storage on magnetic tape On the 50th anniversary of IBM’s introduction of tape storage, one terabyte of uncompressed information was successfully written to and read from a single half-inch tape cartridge. By leveraging technology breakthroughs for hard disk storage, one terabyte is only a milestone, not a barrier. The next 50 years look as good as the last 50 years have been. (Jul. 2003 IBM Journal of Research and Development)

Museum calls on industry to help celebrate IT heritage The UK's Museum of Computing is seeking help from IT companies around the world to draw up its ongoing exhibition programme. By showing the major leaps in technology over the last 70 years, we hope to stimulate the creative thinking of today's engineers, programmers and visionaries. (May 2003 The Register)

Winners Of The 'Oldest Software' Contest PC-based products really can't hold a candle to their mainframe cousins, some of which date back to the dawn of time. We currently have some parts of our G/L system that are from the mid 60's. These are part of the original package from McCormick & Dodge that was purchased to run on an IBM 360 model 20. (Apr. 2003 InternetWeek)

Computers Key in Probe At the heart of the space shuttle's control systems are four main computers: 65-pound, rugged versions of the IBM 360 business mainframe, each equipped with an anemic 512K memory. The software was custom written by IBM in an obscure language called HAL/S. (Feb. 2003 Newsday)

The Story So Far: Hardware Officially known as the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, the Mark I consisted of 78 adding machines and calculators linked together with mechanical counters, paper-tape-fed sequencers and card readers. Two years later, it was dwarfed by the Electronic Numeric Integrator and Calculator, an electronic computer weighing 30 tons and requiring 1,000 square feet of floor space. (Nov. 2002 ComputerWorld)

Visit the Computer History Museum Herman Hollerith constructed a punched-card system in 1880 to automate the U.S. census. He later sold the technology to the company that became IBM. (Jun. 2002 CRN)

A byte out of time When the air produced by the combination of electrolytics, capacitors, old circuits and other devices wafts through experienced nostrils, it triggers a sort of Pavlovian response that instantly transports people back to a different time in their lives. Computers displayed include an ENIGMA device used by a Nazi U-boat during World War II; the ENIAC, Johnniac, WISC, Cray-3 and PDP-1. (May 2002 SF Gate)

The IBM 650 My first computer weighed over three tons and filled an entire room. The CPU alone was about 5 feet by 3 feet by 6 feet and weighed nearly a ton. The IBM 650 was the first computer on which IBM made a meaningful profit. (Nov. 2001 Dr Dobbs Journal)

IBM's 604 and the Lessons of War Tom Watson Jr returned from WWII with a clear sense of how the same technology that had won the war for the Allied powers could also be deployed in commercial products. At issue, however, was the simple business fact of a large company changing direction into uncharted waters. Interestingly, the knowledge gained by returning war veterans probably did more to advance IBM's efforts in electronic computation than did anything else. (June 2001 Dr Dobbs Journal)

Remembering Heroes Although we talk of "generations" in discussing the history of computing, that term is mostly used in the realm of hardware. How fitting, then, to note this last weekend marked the 50th anniversary of UNIVAC's first ship date: serial number 5, sent to the U.S. Census Bureau. (Apr. 2001 Developer.com)

A has-been counter joins the dinosaurs The last surviving, intact, first-generation computer in the world, a 50-year-old room-sized giant of steel crammed with vacuum tubes, has reached its final home. Aptly enough, this 2,000-kilogram relic from the dawn of the information age, a monster with a brain smaller than a modern pocket calculator, now stands near the museum's dinosaur room. (Jan. 2001 Sydney Morning Herald)

Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL HAL remains one of the great screen villains from the era of mainframe computers or "big iron." Determined as he is to fulfill his mission at any and all costs, HAL embodied many of the technology fears of the 1950s and 1960s about large, room-sized computers that would no longer make allowances for human frailties and fallibilities. (Jan. 2001 Software Development)

Big Iron Age Man Talking of I/O and peripherals, I'm reminded of something amusing that happened later on. We used to boot up our System/360 using a whole tray of punched cards. Of course, every time we punched a card, tiny little bits of cardboard would accumulate in a tray beneath the hopper... (Dec. 2000 Dr Dobbs)

Fifteen Years: A Look Back at the Past InformationWeek was first published in January 1985, and has taken a look back on some of the major stories and trends covered over the years:IT innovation in business, leadership skills, privacy, the job market, VC funding, the Microsoft antitrust trial. (Nov. 2000 Informationweek)

It's Not Easy Being Green: The IBM Stretch Project In 1952 a team of senior IBM technical and management staff met to consider building what John von Neumann, then a consultant to IBM, had called "the most advanced machine which is possible in the present state of the art." The first machine was delivered in 1961 with the then-astonishing average reliability of 17 hours before failure. (Dr. Dobbs Journal Jun 2000)

A Brief History of Computing How did the human race evolve into a technophilic species? Take a long, strange trip with us back to the earliest digital domain: we begin our magical history tour in the primordial ocean of prehistoric times... (Cnet Apr. 2000)

The History of Computing Information belongs to Mike Muuss of the Aberdeen Proving Grounds, Maryland. It includes an original machine-language program written for the ENIAC in 1948.