Rowland Aertker
BUILDING IBM, SHAPING AN INDUSTRY AND ITS TECHNOLOGY by Emerson W. Pugh, MIT Press, ISBN 0-262-16147-8, $29.95
Emerson W. Pugh is an insider. He served IBM for 35 years as a research scientist and executive. Since his retirement, he has been granted unrestricted access to the company's archives, putting him in the best possible position to tell this tale. This is not Pugh's first foray into Big Blue's history. He authored or coauthored three other volumes--
Memories That Shaped an Industry: Decisions Leading to IBM System 360
(1984),
IBM's Early Computers
(1986), and
IBM's 360 and Early 370 Systems
(1991).
Those books focused on the development of the technologies that defined mainframe computing in the period from 1950 to 1980.
Building IBM, Shaping an Industry and Its Technology
, clearly intended as a business history, sacrifices technical detail to achieve a broad view of the 100-year evolution of an industry.
Pugh begins his account two decades before the merger that created the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co., rechristened International Business Machines in 1924. He starts with the punched-card machines Herman Hollerith developed to win a contract to tabulate the U.S. census in 1890. This is no accident. Of the three companies that merged to form C-T-R in 1911, only the punched-card business was still a part of IBM at the end of the 1950s. Even more telling is the fact that 60 years after Hollerith won the census contract, punched cards were still used only for recording data. They were not used for programming until 1949.
Building IBM
testifies to the dizzying acceleration of technological change since World War II. Pugh traces the development of the early electronic computers. He also chronicle
s the role of the battle for government contracts, especially during the cold war years, as a goad to technical advances.
It is also a history of the personalities that shaped IBM: executives and managers such as Vincent Learson, John Opel, and Fred Brooks; FORTRAN developer John Backus and RISC architect John Cocke; defectors such as Alan Shugart and Gene Amdahl; and even non-IBMers, such as Seymour Cray.
Of course, the Watsons, senior and junior, are the most prominent players. Anecdotes abound. Pugh finds the origins of policies that defined the IBM image in
the elder Watson
's personal history. The prohibition of alcohol at IBM functions grew out of the consequences of a youthful drinking bout that got him fired from a job selling sewing machines. The straight-arrow demeanor required of IBM employees was the result of a stint running NCR's secondhand cash-register business that found him and 29 other officers under indictment for antitrust violations.
Pugh describ
es the grooming of Tom Watson Jr. to succeed his father and the turbulent years that followed. But this tumultuous period ushered in important advances, including the first all-semiconductor main memory and the first high-speed cache. It also gave birth to Future System, IBM's most expensive failed development effort.
It is obvious that Pugh has combed through mountains of material. There are copious notes for every chapter. He even finds a candidate for the origin of the IBM PC in a 1970 memo. Perhaps the best measure of this book's achievement is the degree to which it stimulates the reader to return to Pugh's earlier volumes for more of the technical detail behind IBM's successes.
photo_link
Yousuf Karsh's famous 1948 photo of Thomas J. Watson.
Rowland Aertker is senior researcher at BYTE. You can contact him on the Internet or BIX at
raertker@BIX.com
.
Big Blue: An Insider's View
