History of IBM Developments

1956 - FIRST MAGNETIC HARD DISK. IBM introduces the world's first magnetic hard disk for data storage. RAMAC (or Random Access Method of Accounting and Control) offers unprecedented performance by permitting random access to any of the million characters distributed over both sides of 50 two-foot-diameter disks. Produced in San Jose, California, IBM's first hard disk stored about 2,000 bits of data per square inch and had a purchase price of about $10,000 per megabyte. By 1997, the cost of storing a megabyte had dropped to around ten cents.

1957 - FORTRAN. IBM revolutionizes programming with the introduction of FORTRAN (Formula Translator). Created by John Backus, it soon becomes the most widely used computer programming language for technical work. For the first time, engineers and scientists can write computer programs in more natural forms, such as C=A/B rather than as strings of "machine language: 1s and 0s.

1997 - DEEP BLUE. The 32-node IBM RS/6000 SP supercomputer, Deep Blue, defeated World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov in the first known instance of a computer vanquishing a world champion chess player in tournament-style competition. Also after years of teamwork among Research and Microelectronics divisions, IBM introduced the CMOS 7S process, which allowed manufacturers to use copper wires to link transistors in computer chips instead of relying on traditional aluminum interconnects; a revolutionary advance in semiconductor technology.



Saturday, June 30, 2012

Irving Ziller and Fortran


Irving Ziller Joins the Fortran Team

In January 1954, John Backus got his first conscript, Irving Ziller. A graduate of Brooklyn College, Ziller joined IBM in 1952 and had been put to work programming plug boards on electronic calculators. The calculators were made from a series of these plug boards, roughly 8" 1/2 by 11" inches, filled with holes into which wires were connected by hand. It was another form of hard-wired programming. When complete, a plug-board would look like a miniature jungle of wires rising up from the board.
Irving Ziller quickly proved to be both bright and extremely adept as a plug board programmer. In his apartment in the Riverdale section of New York, Ziller described his plug-board programming days in animated detail. This, as you can imagine, was a fairly tedious job, he said. Anyone doing plug boards understood the emerging need to simplify the programming process. So, when asked, Ziller was an eager recruit to John Backus's project.


Harlan Herrick Joins

Soon after, the team got its third member, Harlan Herrick. He was a math major at Iowa State University, and an outstanding chess player, who had won regional tournaments in the Midwest. He was awarded a scholarship to Yale University for graduate studies, but he was unhappy there. After reading an article about IBM's SSEC machine, he applied for a programming job and was hired.
When he joined the FORTRAN team, Harlan Herrick had five years of experience programming IBM's SSEC and 701 machines. That made him a wizened veteran among programmers at the time. Within IBM, Herrick was known as a naturally gifted programmer, and his work was instrumental to the success of FORTRAN. At the start, though, he was the most skeptical because he was the most steeped in the programming practices of the time. Herrick was a member of the priesthood. When Backus first told him about the project, Herrick was incredulous. I said, John, we can't possibly simulate a human programmer with a language, this language, that would produce machine code that would even approach the efficiency of a human programmer like me, for example, Herrick recalled in 1982. I'm a great programmer, don't you know?
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