X-Nico

51 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.

1995 ATP Tour World Championships

The 1995 ATP Tour World Championships (also known for the singles event as the IBM-ATP Tour World Championship for sponsorship reasons) were tennis tournaments played on indoor carpet courts.

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.

A Real Partnership

The one-page summary for the Cabinet (to which Sir Frank refers as the “Janet and John bit”) makes the case by comparing similar jobs in industry, namely the directors of BP and 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.

Bykenhulle

Later owners of Bykenhulle have included an IBM executive and the current bed and breakfast operators, both of whom have continued to maintain the property's historic character.

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.

DBCS

Some IBM mainframes do have true DBCS code pages, which contain only the double byte portion of a multibyte code page.

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).

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.

Excimer laser

-- Excimer laser light is typically absorbed within under a millionth of a meter (nanometer) of tissue. * * *a millionth of a meter is a micrometer, a billionth of a meter is a nanometer. Which one is it?* * *-->In 1980–1983, Rangaswamy Srinivasan, Samuel Blum and James Wynne at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center observed the effect of the ultraviolet excimer laser on biological materials.

Giora Leshem

In addition, he studied computer operating systems at IBM.

Harold Gardner

He was a master mechanic and machinist who worked for IBM, Endicott Johnson, City of Binghamton, and Link Aviation as well as Pratt-Whitney during the Second World War, troubleshooting aircraft engines.

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.

IBM Big Blue

IBM Big Blue is a Japanese semi-professional rugby union team in the Top League, founded in 1976 by IBM.

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 railway station

As the name suggests, it is located within the confines of a large facility formerly owned entirely by IBM, a former major employer for the town of Greenock.

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).

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.

Internet Evolution

Internet Evolution was launched in October, 2007 by UBM Techweb with sponsorship from technology and consulting firm IBM.

James C. McGroddy Prize for New Materials

The James C. McGroddy Prize for New Materials is a prize that has been awarded annually by the American Physical Society since 1975, but was only given that name following its endowment by IBM in 1999.

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.

Majestic Centre

As of 2006, IBM New Zealand is the anchor tenant, with naming rights to the building.

Mazovia encoding

A supplemental feature was that the block graphic characters of code page 437 remained unchanged (IBM's official Central-European code page 852 did not have this property, making programs like Norton Commander look funny with corners and joints of border lines broken by accented letters).

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.

MSI Barcode

There are two modulo 11 algorithms which use different repeated weighting factor patterns: the IBM algorithm which uses (2,3,4,5,6,7), and the NCR algorithm which uses (2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9).

New York State Route 113

West of the interchange, NY 113 continues as a local road into the IBM Poughkeepsie main plant.

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Spackenkill Road initially followed what is now IBM Road through the interchange with US 9 and into the IBM plant, where it ended at the CR 48 portion of IBM Road.

OpenGL++

The project started as the result of a partnership between SGI, IBM and Intel (and later Digital Equipment Corporation as well) to provide a higher level API than the "bare metal" support of OpenGL, as well as being an implementation for Java3D.

Paul Rand

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

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Paul Rand (August 15, 1914 – November 26, 1996) was an American art director and graphic designer, best known for his corporate logo designs, including the logos for IBM, UPS, Enron, Morningstar, Inc., Westinghouse, ABC, and Steve Jobs's NeXT.

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.

R.J. Harlick

In her former career R.J. Harlick worked for major computer corporations such as IBM and DMR Group, then with her own management consultancy practice.

Roberta Langtry

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

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".

Service Update Management Assistant

SUMA automates the retrieval of maintenance updates from 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.

Sunday NFL Countdown

The official name is Sunday NFL Countdown presented by IBM.

There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom

These ideas were later realized by the use of the scanning tunneling microscope, the atomic force microscope and other examples of scanning probe microscopy and storage systems such as Millipede, created by researchers at IBM.

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.

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.


3590

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

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

Automatic Language Translator

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

Christopher J. Date

He left IBM in 1983 and has written extensively of the relational model, in association with Hugh Darwen.

CKD

Count Key Data, a disk architecture used in IBM mainframe computers

Cluster Exploratory

"The cluster will consist of 1,600 processors, several terabytes of memory, and hundreds of terabytes of storage, along with the software, including IBM's Tivoli and open source versions of Google File System and MapReduce".

Cognos Reportnet

ReportNet is developed by Canada’s Ottawa based business intelligence (BI) and performance management solutions company Cognos (formerly Cognos Incorporated), an IBM company.

Corticon

Corticon’s competitors include: Bosch Software Innovations, FICO, IBM/ILOG, InRule Technology, OpenRules, Pegasystems, Red Hat, and others.

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.

Douglas Chaffee

Chaffee has also worked as head of IBM's Art Department, has done paintings for NASA, the military, the book and the gaming industry, and did the official program painting for the Trident submarine.

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).

Emanuel R. Piore

In 1967, his leadership at IBM was recognized by the Industrial Research Institute when it awarded him the illustrious IRI Medal.

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.

Hash function

Donald Knuth notes that Hans Peter Luhn of IBM appears to have been the first to use the concept, in a memo dated January 1953, and that Robert Morris used the term in a survey paper in CACM which elevated the term from technical jargon to formal terminology.

IBM 1442

The 1442 Model 6 attached to an IBM System/3 or IBM 1130, read 300 cpm and punched 80 columns per second.

IBM 1500

Seeded by a research grant in 1964 from the U.S. Department of Education to the Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences at Stanford University, the IBM 1500 CAI system was initially prototyped at the Brentwood Elementary School (Ravenswood City School District) in East Palo Alto, California by Dr. Patrick Suppes of Stanford University.

IBM DB2 Commonstore

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

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 Series/1

The IBM Series/1 computer is a 16-bit minicomputer, introduced in 1976, that in many respects competed with other minicomputers of the time, such as the PDP-11 from Digital Equipment Corporation and similar offerings from Data General and HP.

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.

Igor Ansoff

He has consulted with hundreds of multinational corporations including, Philips, General Electric, Gulf, IBM, Sterling and Westinghouse.

InfiniBand

In 2009, IBM announced a December 2009 release date for their DB2 pureScale offering, a shared-disk clustering scheme (inspired by parallel sysplex for DB2 z/OS) that uses a cluster of IBM System p servers (POWER6/7) communicating with each other over an InfiniBand interconnect.

InfiniBand Trade Association

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

J/XFS

J/XFS was developed by the companies DeLaRue, IBM, NCR, Wincor Nixdorf and Sun Microsystems and is now hosted, monitored and maintained by the European Committee for Standardisation, CEN.

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.

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’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.

Model M keyboard

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

National champions

The risk involved with such policies is exemplified by the unsuccessful challenges to IBM’s dominance of the computer market by UK’s ICL,  France’s Bull,  and  Italy’s Olivetti during the 1970s.

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.

Open Cluster Framework

Original supporters included several computing companies and groups, including Compaq, Conectiva, IBM, Linux-HA, MSC Software, the Open Source Development Lab, OSCAR, Red Hat, SGI and SUSE.

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.

OpenPages

The OpenPages name continues to be applied to IBM's line of Governance, Risk, and Compliance products.

Peter G. Gyarmati

After their earlier work with Ferranti, then the successor ICL, in Manchester University he joined for research to IBM from 1972 until 1981, working in Poughkeepsie, Yorktown, New York, and the Delft University, the Netherlands.

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.

Programmed Airline Reservations System

Programmed Airline Reservations System (PARS) is an IBM proprietary large scale airline reservation application, a computer reservations system, executing under the control of IBM Airline Control Program (ACP) (and later its successor, Transaction Processing Facility (TPF)).

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).

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.

Sequent Computer Systems

During this period, the NUMA technology became the basis for IBM's extended X-Architecture (eXA, which could also stand for enterprise X-Architecture).

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.

Skolkovo innovation center

The agreement was signed by Victor Vekselberg, President of the Skolkovo Foundation; Anatoly Chubais, CEO and Chairman of the Executive Board of Rosnano; Alexander Provotorov, President and Chairman of the Management Board of Rostelecom; Igor Agamirzian, CEO of Russian Venture Company; Evgeny Babayan, Chairman of the Board, ITFY; Leonid Svatkov, CEO ITFY; Bruno Di Leo, Senior Vice President IBM; and Kirill Korniliev, Country General Manager, IBM Russia & CIS.

Van Wolverton

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

Wallace John Eckert

A massive machine built to Eckert's specifications was built and installed behind glass at IBM's headquarters on Madison Avenue in January 1948.