X-Nico

58 unusual facts about IBM


1990 PGA Championship

Concerns about racial discrimination in the club's membership caused many sponsors to pull their network television advertising, including IBM.

ACF2

The "2" also helped to distinguish the product from IBM's ACF/VTAM.

APAR

Authorized Program Analysis Report, in IBM nomenclature, a problem officially recognized and diagnosed by IBM's support department.

Arturo Molina Gutiérrez

He is also involved in the PYME CREATIVA project in Peru to support small and medium-sized enterprises funded by the IBM Shared University Research (SUR) program and the ICT-BUS of the Inter-American Development Bank.

Best Selling Secrets

IBM T2x ThinkPad laptop computers were also featured as mobile workstations of choice for the characters.

Dominant design

When a new technology emerges (e.g. computer GUI operating systems) – often firms will introduce a number of alternative designs (e.g. Microsoft – Windows, Apple Inc. – Mac OS and IBM – OS/2).

Durham Energy Institute

Its board of advisors includes Ian Burdon, Benj Sykes DONG Energy, John Loughhead UKERC, Helen Moss IBM and Andrew Mill Narec.

Edmund Skellings

Skellings' system of organizing text on a color monitor led to the publication of a color authoring system entitled Electric Poet by International Business Machines Inc. in 1984 and a further product entitled Easy Street by McGraw-Hill.

End-of-transmission character

The EOT character is used in legacy communications protocols by mainframe computer manufacturers such as IBM, Burroughs Corporation, and the BUNCH.

Georges Frêche

Building on the trend started by his predecessor François Delmas, who landed the Southern Europe IBM factory and headquarters as well as the scientific university, Frêche expanded Montpellier in all directions, propelling it from the 25th-largest city in France to the eighth, in less than 30 years.

Giora Leshem

In addition, he studied computer operating systems at IBM.

Howard H. Aiken

Howard Hathaway Aiken (March 8, 1900 – March 14, 1973) was a pioneer in computing, being the original conceptual designer behind IBM's Harvard Mark I computer.

Hugh Henry

He has worked as an accountant with IBM UK Ltd, as a teacher and as a welfare rights officer with Strathclyde Regional Council.

IBM Building, Johannesburg

The building was initially built to house the South African headquarters of IBM, but after IBM moved their headquarters to Sandton, the building is unoccupied as of 2005.

IBM Rational Performance Tester

IBM Rational Performance Tester is a tool for automated performance testing of web and server based applications from the Rational Software division of IBM.

IBM's The Great Mind Challenge

International Business Machines (IBM), which was founded in 1896 as The Tabulating Machine Company, is a multinational computer, technology and IT consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, North Castle, New York, United States.

IFPS

IFPS was available for a variety of platforms, including IBM mainframes (VM/CMS), DEC VAX, various flavors of Unix, DOS-based PCs and Macintosh Computers (named "Mindsight"- running on two floppies).

Imperative programming

FORTRAN, developed by John Backus at IBM starting in 1954, was the first major programming language to remove the obstacles presented by machine code in the creation of complex programs.

INAIL Tower

It was purchased in the mid-eighties by IBM company, which faced serious problems related to aging and to the safety of the building: very high energy consumption and inadequate fire safety measures.

Independent software vendor

The companies that make the platforms, such as Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Novell, Google, Oracle, Apple, SAP and salesforce.com encourage and lend support to ISVs, often with special "business partner" programs.

Infoscope

The device is presently in the prototype stage and was conceived and developed by Ismail Haritaoglu at IBM's Almaden Research Center.

Jeannette K. Watson Fellowship

The fellowship is a program of the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, named after the wife of IBM founder Thomas J. Watson.

Kissing Jessica Stein

Her mother had invited an IBM executive in hopes of setting him up with Jessica.

Klaus Darga

Klaus retired as a chess professional and became a computer programmer for IBM.

La Gaude

IBM established a research centre in La Gaude in the 1960s.

Lehmer random number generator

The GNU Scientific Library includes several random number generators of the Lehmer form, including MINSTD, RANF, and the infamous IBM random number generator RANDU.

Liz Phillips

Phillips has also collaborated with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and her work was presented by the Cleveland Orchestra, IBM, and the World Financial Center.

Lund v. Commonwealth

The computers were leased from IBM computers and the cost was distributed through various departments that used the computer facilities.

Meedan

Meedan’s translation technology has been developed in collaboration with The Watson Research Group at IBM with which it entered into a research partnership in 2006.

Military Ordinariate of Lithuania

Gintaras Grusas (appointed 19 June 2010 - named Archbishop of Vilnius 5 April 2013) Bishop Grusas, 51 (born 1961), was originally a technological consultant for marketing at IBM and was born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Los Angeles.

Modern Literal Version

Started originally in 1987 on two IBM clone 8086 and 80286 computers, this is probably the first computerized translation of the New Testament.

Mount Helen, Victoria

Mount Helen is the headquarters of Federation University Australia and the Ballarat Technology Park, a campus style office park with tenants including IBM, and a number of state government offices including the State Revenue Office, collectively employing more than 1,400 people.

New York State Route 134

For a short distance after the interchange, NY 134 becomes four lanes as the road serves IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center.

Nisar Memon

Before joining the Pakistani Senate, he was the Federal Minister for Information and Broadcasting (1993 & 2002), the Federal Minister for Kashmir Affairs & Northern Areas and State & Frontier Regions (KANA & SAFRON) during 1993 and 2002, the Country General Manager for IBM (1989–1999) and the Chairman of the Board of Directors for ENGRO Pakistan (2001–2002).

Norman Longworth

He then commenced his more academic career as UNESCO-IBM Professor of Information Technology ate Southampton University on secondment from IBM, a progression which has continued to the present.

Object-oriented operating system

Taligent was an object-oriented operating system project, started by Apple Inc. and jointly developed with IBM in the 1990s.

OpenMAX

Promoting members in 2008 were AMD, Apple, ARM, Creative, Dell Inc, Ericsson, Freescale, Imagination Technologies Group plc, Intel, IBM, Motorola, Nokia, Nvidia Corporation, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd, SK Telecom, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc and Texas Instruments.

Paul Rand

IBM, ABC, Cummins Engine, UPS, and the now-infamous Enron, among many others, owe Rand their graphical heritage.

Poughkeepsie Day School

A new capital campaign in 1994, involving donations from individuals and grants from foundations, funded a move to a new location in buildings formerly owned by IBM on Boardman Road, which is the school's current location.

Premiership of Morarji Desai

The policy proved controversial, diminishing foreign investment and led to the high-profile exit of corporations such as Coca-Cola and IBM from India.

QuickTransit

In August 2006, IBM announced a partnership with Transitive to run Linux/x86 binaries on its Power Architecture based Power Systems machines.

Raymond Ameijide

Ameijide served as an illustrator a variety of clients, including Fortune, National Geographic, IBM, Pfizer, TV Guide, Chase Manhattan, Discover, Harcourt Brace and the United States Post Office (per his obituary January 12, 2000, TheJournalNews.com).

Robert Methuen, 7th Baron Methuen

Methuen worked as design engineer for Westinghouse Brake and Signal Company from 1957 to 1967, and then as computer systems engineer for IBM UK Ltd from 1968 to 1975 and for Rolls-Royce plc from 1975 to 1994.

Roberta Langtry

Most likely her best investment was in shares of IBM, which she purchased in either the 1940s or 1950s.

Roy Kuhlman

Later he was hired by the public relations firm Ruder & Finn to establish an in-house art department, then joined Benton & Bowles, where he designed the award-winning Mathematics Serving Man campaign for IBM, which appeared in Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report in May 1960.

Sampson House

The announcement also stated that "Sampson House comprises 386,288sq.ft. of office space let to IBM UK Limited. The lease expires in December 2025 but, includes a mutual break clause in June 2018. The current rent is £8 million p.a. and will rise to £9.5 million p.a. in December this year".

Sharon Hayes

Hayes is a graduate of the Honours Math and Computer Science program at the University of Waterloo; while enrolled there, she worked as a co-op student with the Toronto Stock Exchange and IBM.

Shefayim

In 2012 IBM acquired New York- and Shefayim-based mobile application developer Worklight Ltd., founded in 2006 by Shahar Kaminitz, formerly of Amdocs.

Spoken English Corpus

The Spoken English Corpus (SEC) is a speech corpus used in corpus linguistics consisting of a collection of recordings of spoken British English compiled during the period 1984-7 through a collaboration, funded by IBM, between the Unit for Computer Research on the English Language (UCREL) at the University of Lancaster and the IBM Scientific Centre in Winchester.

Stan Lopata

After his professional baseball career was over, Lopata made a living by working at a steel plant in Dearborn, Michigan, later moving back to Philadelphia to work for IBM.

TaiKoo Place

The local headquarters of IBM is also situated there, occupying the first 15 storeys.

Treddy Ketcham

He was subsequently hired as a special counsel for IBM until his pension in 1984.

Ulrich Steinhilper

As a post-war IBM typewriter salesman, he was an early proponent of word processing, considered by some to have either coined the phrase or even originated the concept.

Ulrich Walter

When the German astronaut team was merged into a European Space Agency, he did not transfer, but resigned to work at IBM Germany.

UTF-EBCDIC

IBM EBCDIC-based mainframe operating systems, such as z/OS, usually use UTF-16 for complete Unicode support.

Versit Consortium

The Versit Consortium was a multivendor initiative founded by Apple Computer, AT&T, IBM and Siemens in the early 1990s in order to create Personal Data Interchange (PDI) technology, open specifications for exchanging personal data over the Internet, wired and wireless connectivity and Computer Telephony Integration (CTI).

Virtualization engine

A good example of virtualization is IBM's virtualization engine which offers a common way to address component level devices.

Zyll

It was written by Marshal Linder and Scott Edwards, two IBM employees, and marketed as an adventure game.


3590

IBM 3590, a series of tape drives and corresponding magnetic tape data storage media formats developed by IBM

7 Billion Actions

IBM: As a way to celebrate their 100th anniversary, IBM is launching its Global Celebration of Service, a worldwide volunteer service initiative which calls for staff to donate their time and energy for specific social causes.

ALCS transaction monitor

It is a variant of TPF specially designed to provide all the benefits of TPF (very high speed, high volume, and high availability in transaction processing) but with the advantages such as easier integration into the data center offered by running on a standard IBM operating system platform.

Amdahl

Amdahl Corporation, a manufacturer of IBM-mainframe-compatible computers

American Airlines Flight 6780

Patterson was returning from meeting Thomas J. Watson of IBM, who had just hired him for a new case on the previous day.

Automatic Language Translator

In 1954 IBM gave an influential demonstration of machine translation, known today as the "Georgetown-IBM experiment".

Code page

IBM introduced the concept of systematically assigning a small, but globally unique, 16 bit number to each character encoding that a computer system or collection of computer systems might encounter.

David Webber

He holds two US software patents on XML and EDI technologies that have been widely referenced by 37 other patent applications from leading implementing companies such as IBM, Oracle Corporation, AT&T, GE, SAP, NEC and Dell.

EBCDIC

Open-source-software advocate and hacker Eric S. Raymond writes in his Jargon File that EBCDIC was almost universally loathed by early hackers and programmers because of its multitude of different versions, none of which resembled the other versions, and that IBM produced it in direct competition with the already-established ASCII.

ECC memory

This weakness is addressed by various technologies : Chipkill(IBM), Extended ECC(Sun Microsystems), Chipspare(Hewlett Packard) or SDDC=Single Device Data Correction(Intel).

Ellen Hancock

In September 1995 she started with National Semiconductor as Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer (COO), after being lured from IBM by Gil Amelio.

ESoft

eSoft was founded by Philip L. Becker in 1984 and started out making and selling the TBBS (bulletin board system) initially targeted at RadioShack TRS-80 CP/M machines, but later ported to IBM-PC computers.

Gerstner

Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. (born 1942), chairman of the board and CEO of IBM

IBM 305 RAMAC

During the 1960 Olympic Winter Games in Squaw Valley (USA), IBM provided the first electronic data processing systems for the Games.

IBM DB2 Commonstore

Part of the IBM Information Management portfolio which builds upon the DB2 database platform.

IBM LAN Server

The network client was called IBM LAN Requester and was included with OS/2 EE 1.1 by default.

IBM Research

IBM Research was behind the inventions of the SABRE travel reservation system, the technology of laser eye surgery, magnetic storage, the relational database, UPC barcodes and Watson, the question-answering computing system that won a match against human champions on the Jeopardy! television quiz show.

IBM Systems Network Architecture

While IBM is still providing support for SNA, one of the primary pieces of hardware, the 3745/3746 communications controller, has been withdrawn from the market by IBM.

InfiniBand Trade Association

The IBTA was established in 1999, and a few of its prominent members include IBM, Intel, Mellanox, Oracle, HP, and Cray.

James W. Bryce

In 1937 Bryce was approached by Howard Aiken of Harvard University, who persuaded IBM to fund a programmable calculator which became the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), better known as the Harvard Mark I.

Jean Calvignac

He had previously been responsible for system design of the ATM switching products, which he initiated with his team in 1992 at the IBM Laboratory in La Gaude, France.

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In 1998, at the IBM Laboratory in the Research Triangle Park, Calvignac and his team initiated the IBM network processor activities.

Lew Murphy

During this time Tucson's population almost doubled, the city annexed 63 square miles, and Learjet and IBM opened manufacturing plants.

M-Pesa

Development and second line support responsibilities were transferred to IBM in September 2009, to where most of the original Sagentia team transferred.

Meedan

Meedan has received more than $3.2 million in research and development support from IBM to further the development of its Arabic-English Automated Translation technology and to support Meedan’s ongoing work on “a social media sharing platform bridging the Arabic and English speaking communities”.

Model M keyboard

These keyboards were produced by IBM in their plants in Lexington, Greenock and Guadalajara.

Office Open XML

The same InfoWorld article reported that IBM (which supports the ODF format) threatened to leave standards bodies that it said allow dominant corporations like Microsoft to wield undue influence.

OpenAtom

OpenAtom has shown good scaling up to 20,480 processors of IBM's Blue Gene/L and 4,096 processors of Cray XT3.

OpenCrowd

Founded in 2005, it is headed by Sushil Prabhu as CEO, formerly CTO at Scient, with Bob Howe, founder of IBM’s consulting practice, and former CEO of Scient, serving as its Chairman.

PC-based IBM-compatible mainframes

As of November 1988, IBM was shipping a workstation version of the System/370 hardware intended to run IBM's VM/SP operating system.

Presentation Manager

In latest versions, IBM has commissioned SciTech Software with writing the graphics drivers for the majority of the cards that don't support OS/2 officially.

RadRails

During that time, the three developers worked as co-ops from the Rochester Institute of Technology at IBM Rational in Raleigh, NC.

Renewable Energy Derivative

This process was first applied to renewable energy by Joseph Brant Arseneau and his team at IBM.

Roberto Busa

In 1949 he met with Thomas J. Watson, the founder of IBM, and was able to persuade him to sponsor the Index Thomisticus.

Service Update Management Assistant

SUMA automates the retrieval of maintenance updates from IBM.

Six-bit character code

IBM applied the terms binary-coded decimal and BCD to the variations of BCD alphamerics used in most early IBM computers, including the IBM 1620, IBM 1400 series, and non-Decimal Architecture members of the IBM 700/7000 series.

Supercomputing in Europe

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Sofia operates an IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer, which offers high-performance processing to the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and Sofia University, among other organizations.

UTF-8

In August 1992, this proposal was circulated by an IBM X/Open representative to interested parties.

Van Wolverton

Wolverton has written other computer books, addressing MS-DOS, IBM OS/2, Microsoft Windows, WordPerfect, Netscape FastTrack, VisiCalc, QBasic and more.

VS/9

Interactive use of VS/9 was done through terminals connected to a terminal concentrator unit, which passed control signals to and from the terminals, in a manner similar to the way IBM would provide with its IBM 3270-style terminals.

Wordtris

Wordtris, stylized as WORDTЯIS, is a Tetris offshoot designed by Alexey Pajitnov and published by Spectrum Holobyte in 1991 for the IBM PC platform.