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The Sixties - Hardware
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
- Thomas J. Watson Sr., chairman of IBM, 1943
The son, Thomas Watson Jr. - who became president of the firm in 1952 - was to prove
the father quite wrong. As TIME Magazine would comment in 1998: "[Watson Jr.] boldly
took IBM - and the world - into the computer age, and in the process developed a company
whose awesome sales and service savvy and dark-suited culture stood for everything good
and bad about corporate America. No wonder the Justice Department sought (unsuccess-
fully) to break it up."
In sum, the 1960s would be the decade of IBM, which controlled approx. 70% of the
mainframe market by 1960 and would continue to do so throughout the decade. Sales of the
market-leading 709 pushed IBM to this dramatic market-share.
Although sometimes not at the very forefront of technological R&D, IBM came to excel
at perfecting and integrating new innovations pioneered by others while at the same time
minimizing production costs through carefully refined manufacturing parameters. The firm
as well offered consistently economical pricing and provided unparalleled product and cus-
tomer support which became legend throughout the western business world. (In time, the
expression "Nobody ever got fired for adopting IBM equipment" would become a common
phrase in conference rooms from Tokyo to Hamburg.)
The corporate culture at IBM was nothing if not unique. "Watson [Jr.] promoted
'scratchy, harsh' individuals and pressured them to think ahead," commented TIME. "When
IBM engineers complained that transistors were unreliable, Watson handed out transistor ra-
dios and challenged the critics to wear them out. He never backed away from conflict [and]
he installed a 'contention' system that encouraged IBM managers to challenge one another.
Watson was paternal with rank-and-file employees, but he was murder on his lieutenants, in
accordance with his dictum that 'the higher the monkey climbs, the more he shows his ass.'"
One major innovation which led to IBM's market dominance was its 1956 introduction
of a spinning disk technology for handling random-access storage. Through this technology,
IBM provided direct, interactive access to large amounts of data - a key to the further market
adoption of mainframes in general. Developed by IBM engineers in San Jose, California,
IBM's Model 305 Disk Storage unit used a micro-slice of air as a cushion between the disk
and the computer head, thus allowing for rapid rotation. Fifty 24-inch aluminum disks rotat-
ing at 1200 rpm provided the attached IBM 650 mainframes with a RAM storage capacity
of five million characters.
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