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The IBM Century: Creating the IT Revolution

The IBM Century: Creating the IT Revolution

Current price: $29.95
This product is not returnable.
Publication Date: November 2nd, 2011
Publisher:
IEEE Computer Society Press
ISBN:
9780769546117
Pages:
294
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Description

More than a century ago Herman Hollerith pioneered punch card tabulation technology. In 1911 his enterprise became the centerpiece of a new corporation (renamed in the 1920s), International Business Machines (IBM). Over the past century IBM has transformed how we record, calculate, and process information -- forever changing business, science, engineering, government, and leisure. Far more than any other firm, IBM created the IT revolution.

This unique volume brings together fascinating memoirs of key IBM engineers and managers of the past 100 years -- from Walter Jones, who started as a sales engineer in 1912 and rose through the ranks for three decades, to Cuthbert Hurd, James Birkenstock, Bob Evans, John Backus, Watts Humphrey, and others who led IBM to supremacy in digital computing and software. It details punch card tabulation, IBM's entrance into computing, and the transformative IBM hardware (IBM 650, IBM 1401, System/360) and software (FORTRAN, SABRE, IMS) that changed the world. The IBM Century contains an IBM timeline, the most comprehensive IBM annotated bibliography to date, and a new introductory essay that characterizes IBM's 100-year history and contextualizes each of the memoirs.

About the Author

Jeffrey R. Yost is associate director of the Charles Babbage Institute, a faculty member in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine Program at the University of Minnesota, and editor-in-chief of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. He has published books on the history of the computer industry and scientific computing, and more than a dozen single-authored, peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on the business, social, cultural, and intellectual history of computing. He has led or co-led more than $1.6 million in National Science Foundation sponsored historical research projects on computing, software, and networking.