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other firms. (When two of the 'dwarfs', RCA and General Electric,
left the computer business in the late '
s this was amended to 'IBM
and the BUNCH', with the latter acronym standing for Burroughs,
Univac, NCR, Control Data and Honeywell.) IBM took full advan-
tage of government and military funded projects to further its
own research into computing, starting with the Defense Calculator,
developed during the Korean War, which became the basis of its
first proper computer, the
60
, and onto work done on the SAGE
early warning system, the National Security Agency's STRETCH
system, and SABRE, the airline ticket system. Out of these projects
came the technological know-how necessary for the commercial
products by which the name IBM became almost synonymous with
corporate business.
The technology IBM developed, promoted and sold, with the
batch-processing, hierarchical style of computing that it encouraged,
mirrored the state-regulated balanced economy and social cohesion
of the post-war consensus. It is telling that IBM encouraged a mass-
production model of programming, rewarding high productivity in
terms of lines of code, rather than the elegant solutions to problems
preferred by the early 'hackers', the computer devotees at MIT and
elsewhere, who became fascinated by the more radical possibilities
of digital technology. Nevertheless in the late '
701
50
s, '
60
s and into the
'
s, IBM was computing. It not only dominated computing sales
at this time, but also defined the image of the computer industry as
a corporate endeavour. With IBM computing was a multinational
business, the success of which was based on the highly organized and
regimented structure of the company, reinforced by the IBM sales-
men's obligatory blue suits and white shirts, and their corporate song
sheets to be sung at IBM summer camp. This almost Maoist model of
collective corporate organization did not make IBM popular among
some people working in computing. For those with radical political
leanings IBM came to represent the exploitation of the idea of the
computer as a tool of corporate control with military connotations,
70
