100 Years of IBM

May 6, 2024

There are considerable statistics on human life expectancy Men in the United States are expected to live 76 years, and women are expected to live nearly 81 years. These are actually lower than for many countries in the world with the United States ranking seventy second in life expectancy . The country with the highest life expectancy is Monaco with men living 85.70 years and women living 93.49 years. But, what about the life expectancy of a company

Company mortality versus lifetime (Daepp, et al. 2015).[1]

The mortality function closely follows an exponential curve based on a constant hazard rate.

(Fig. 4 of ref 1, released under the Creative Commons Attribution License. Click for larger image.)

In general, smaller companies grow quickly, while the sales of older companies plateaued as they reached maturity .[2] The research team found that a company's risk of dying in the next year was not correlated with its product or how long it had been in business .[2] While the study didn't examine the reasons for this trend, they conjectured that companies, like Living organisms , must compete for scarce resources to survive .[2]

Other research shows that the lifespan of an S&P 500 company has decreased from 67 years in the 1920s to just 15 years today.[3] Interestingly, Japan , a country that ranks fourth in human life expectancy, is host to some of the oldest companies in the world.[3] Japan has more than 20,000 companies that are more than a 100 years old, and a few that are more than a thousand years old.[3] For companies, innovation and reinvention are the most important factors for survival.[3] Startups will often pivot from their initial business idea. Nokia , a cellphone and telecommunications manufacturer , started as a pulp manufacturer; and, Berkshire Hathaway , started as a textile mill in Rhode Island .[3]

The International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is a company with significant longevity. James W. Cortada , a senior research fellow at the University of Minnesota's Charles Babbage Institute who worked at IBM for 38 years in various positions, has written an article in IEEE Spectrum about the origin of IBM.[4]

Back in the late 19th century , business equipment such as adding machines cash registers , and weight scales were in increasing demand, as were time clocks for logging the hours of manufacturing employees .[4] A 1911 merger of several companies in these markets resulted in the creation of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (C-T-R) .[4] In 1914, Thomas John Watson Sr. (1874-1956) was hired by C-T-R to increase sales.[4] Watson had worked for twenty years at the National Cash Register Company , which was considered to be one of the best managed companies at that time.[4]

Under Watson, C-T-R revenue grew from $4 million in 1914 to $14 million in 1920.[4] In February, 1924, International Business Machines became a New York corporation taking over business and assets of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company.[4]

Watson was wholeheartedly committed to the production of mainframe computers , which had been a low profitability product for IBM. There were numerous technology advancement made by IBM before Watson left in 1971 after having a heart attack . I've listed many of these that I've judged to be the most important.

A diode-transistor-logic (DTL) NAND gate built from a PNP transistor in 1959.

As can be seen, IBM had an unique way of representing transistors at that time.

(Wikimedia Commons image/ Click for larger image.)

A keyboard that only a mathematician would love. This is the layout of the IBM APL keyboard. APL was the timeshare interpretive programming language of the IBM System/360 and System/370. APL was principally created by computer scientist, Kenneth E. Iverson (1920-2004). (Via Wikimedia Commons.)

IBM PC 5150 with a 5151 green monochrome monitor. This computer is running MS-DOS 5.0.

I once had a CP/M computer with an amber (P3 phosphor) monochrome monitor. I can still remember that soothing display color.

(Wikimedia Commons image. Click for larger image.)

• The United States antitrust lawsuit against IBM was dismissed in 1982 as being without merit. This suit was initiated in 1969, and it spawned another popular joke in its early years - "An IBM engineer invented a time machine. To prove that it worked, he travelled to a date in the far future. When he returned, his colleagues asked him about the first thing he did in the future. He responded that he bought a newspaper to check the status of the IBM antitrust lawsuit."

• In 1998, IBM introduced the first microprocessor with a GHz clock rate.

Beginning in the 1990s, IBM began downsizing operations divesting some operations, such as its personal computer division, and concentrating on computer services, software, supercomputers , and scientific research. In 2001, IBM became the first company to produce more than 3,000 patents in one year; and, in 2008 achieved 4,000 patents. In its lifetime, IBM has been issued more than 150,000 patents. Among its innovations, IBM introduced the floppy disk , the magnetic stripe card as found on credit cards , and the Universal Product Code (UPC) barcode . IBM scientists arranged 35 xenon atoms in a scanning tunneling microscope to spell "IBM" in 1990. IBM has had five Nobel Physics Laureates that include Leo Esaki (b. 1925) in 1973 for his invention of the tunnel diode Gerd Binnig (b. 1947) and Heinrich Rohrer (1933-2013) in 1986 for the scanning tunneling microscope, and Georg Bednorz (b. 1950) and Alex Müller (1927-2023) in 1987 for the discovery of high temperature superconductors

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