Who invented ibm computer

Intel also offered software with which to write new code on its microprocessors. With this, Intel "had in fact invented a personal computer," Cerruzi writes.

But amateurs did. They came up with a host of "home brew" systems on smaller machines. They had names like the Mark-8 and TV-Typewriter. At the same time, Hewlett-Packard released a programmable calculator. It was in this context that the Altair emerged. It's difficult today to imagine the Altair as the founding PC. The machine had no keyboard. It had no video monitor. It lost its data when you shut it off.

But when advertised in the January edition of Popular Electronics, a critical mass of readers quickly saw that they could adapt the device to their computing needs. Its Intel microprocessor could address far more memory than earlier editions and permitted much more subroutine use. And the Altair offered an "open bus" that enabled users to connect to storage, video display and alphanumeric devices, often built by themselves. Marketing the computer as a bare-bones kit offered a way for thousands of people to bootstrap their way into the computer age, at a pace that they, not a computer company, could control.

The tail end of the Altair story is well known. He found two students at Harvard's Computing Center who wrote a version of it for him on a PDP, using written specifications for the Intel One of them, William Gates, eventually founded Microsoft, which made software for the Altair revolution. IBM did eventually join this exploding market.

Its Personal Computer was released in , and the company quickly dispelled the myth that huge size prevented innovation. The IBM PC could be bought with word processing software and, for its time, a very fast spreadsheet program called Lotus But back the original question: Who invented the PC? The answer is Ed Roberts, but also many others. In a sense, the PC was pioneered by everybody who played Spacewar , and by programmers who made time sharing systems their on line homes.

The machine was furthered by consumers who bought a s era calculator and pushed the device's capabilities to the limit, or did the same with Intel processors. Apollo DN Apollo Computer unveils its first workstation, its DN Computers The DN is based on the Motorola microprocessor, high-resolution display and built-in networking - the three basic features of all workstations. Cover Electronic Games. IBM PC. IBM introduces its Personal Computer PC Computers IBM's brand recognition, along with a massive marketing campaign, ignites the fast growth of the personal computer market with the announcement of its own personal computer PC.

MS-DOS startup screen. Osborne I. Direct Drive arm diagram. Salesmen ignored it, not wanting to make a bad recommendation to customers. IBM lowered the PCjr's price, added functions, and tried to persuade dealers to promote it, to no avail. ESD even offered the machines to employees as potential Christmas presents for a few hundred dollars, but that ploy also failed. IBM's relations with its two most important vendors, Intel and Microsoft, remained contentious. Rivals figured out that IBM had set the de facto technical standards for PCs, so they developed compatible versions they could bring to market more quickly and sell for less.

The notable exception was Apple, which set its own standards and retained its small market share for years. As the prices of PC clones kept falling, the machines grew more powerful—Moore's Law at work. By the mids, IBM was reacting to the market rather than setting the pace.

Estridge was not getting along with senior executives at IBM, particularly those on the mainframe side of the house. Then disaster struck. Over the Dallas airport, feet off the ground, a strong downdraft slammed the plane to the ground, killing people including the Estridges and all but one of the other IBM employees. IBMers were in shock. Despite his troubles with senior management, Estridge had been popular and highly respected.

Not since the death of Thomas J. Watson Sr. Hundreds of employees attended the Estridges' funeral. The magic of the PC may have died before the airplane crash, but the tragedy at Dallas confirmed it.

While IBM continued to sell millions of personal computers, over time the profit on its PC business declined. IBM's share of the PC market shrank from roughly 80 percent in — to 20 percent a decade later.

By then, Windows had been on the market for two years and was proving hugely popular. It was already clear that Microsoft was going to become one of the most successful firms in the industry. But Lowe declined the offer, making what was perhaps the second-biggest mistake in IBM's history up to then, following his first one of not insisting on proprietary rights to Microsoft's DOS or the Intel chip used in the PC.

In fairness to Lowe, he was nervous that such an acquisition might trigger antitrust concerns at the U. Department of Justice. But the Reagan administration was not inclined to tamper with the affairs of large multinational corporations. More to the point, Lowe, Opel, and other senior executives did not understand the PC market. Lowe believed that PCs, and especially their software, should undergo the same rigorous testing as the rest of the company's products.

That meant not introducing software until it was as close to bugproof as possible. All other PC software developers valued speed to market over quality—better to get something out sooner that worked pretty well, let users identify problems, and then fix them quickly. Lowe was aghast at that strategy. Salesmen came forward with proposals to sell PCs in bulk at discounted prices but got pushback. The sales team I managed arranged to sell 6, PCs to American Standard, a maker of bathroom fixtures.

But it took more than a year and scores of meetings for IBM's contract and legal teams to authorize the terms. Lowe's team was also slow to embrace the faster chips that Intel was producing, most notably the The new Intel chip had just the right speed and functionality for the next generation of computers. Even as rivals moved to the , IBM remained wedded to the slower chip. As the PC market matured, the gold rush of the late s and early s gave way to a more stable market.

A large software industry grew up. The cost of performing a calculation on a PC dropped so much that it was often significantly cheaper to use a little machine than a mainframe. Corporate customers were beginning to understand that economic reality. Opel retired in , and John F.

Akers inherited the company's sagging fortunes. Akers recognized that the mainframe business had entered a long, slow decline, the PC business had gone into a more rapid fall, and the move to billable services was just beginning. He decided to trim the ranks by offering an early retirement program. But too many employees took the buyout, including too many of the company's best and brightest. Gerstner Jr. It did not matter that Microsoft's software was notorious for having bugs or that IBM's was far cleaner.

IBM was still the third-largest producer of personal computers, including laptops, but PCs had become a commodity business, and the company struggled to turn a profit from those products.

All are businesses far more profitable for IBM than its personal computer unit. IBM already owned 19 percent of Lenovo, which would continue for three years under the deal, with an option to acquire more shares. Ward Jr. The deal ensured that IBM's global customers had familiar support while providing a stable flow of maintenance revenue to IBM for five years.

For Lenovo, the deal provided a high-profile partner. Now the company was partnered with China's largest computer manufacturer, which controlled 27 percent of the Chinese PC market. The deal was one of the most creative in IBM's history. Part of a continuing series looking at photographs of historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.

James W. That, according to historian James W. Cortada , is the most interesting question he's ever asked. He first raised the question in , several years after IBM had introduced its wildly successful personal computer. Cortada was then head of a sales team at IBM's Nashville site. They agreed to send their trucks to pick up a certain number of PCs every month. So we needed to know how many PCs would fit," Cortada explains. Cortada worked in various capacities at IBM for 38 years.

After he retired in , he became a senior research fellow at the University of Minnesota's Charles Babbage Institute , where he specializes in the history of technology. And he continued to research, write, and publish during his IBM career. IEEE Spectrum. I knew what questions to ask.

I knew the skeletons in the closet. Even before he started the book, a big question was whether he'd reveal those skeletons or not.

The Phoenix BIOS was more compatible across 3rd party hardware and software, more crash-proof, faster and more features, and even though not needed by IBM, more hardware-independent. Starting with Chips and Technologies NEAT chipset in , chipsets allowed manufacturers to reduce their costs to make clones even more economically viable, and I think those were the final nails.

If IBM had any chance of reopening the coffin, this was not it. The definition of the PC standard IBM effectively created, and that 3rd-party manufacturers of hardware and software cemented, with the legal enabling provided by the Phoenix BIOS, is what now defined the.

Had Apple allowed a 3rd-party market to flourish, they would have probably gained in sales, even while losing share, just like IBM did with the PC. Based upon your article, there were internal operations at IBM at play, but I believe were less important.

It was the external PC market that caused the downfall. The HX cipher machine is an electromechanical, rotor-based system designed and built by Crypto AG. The machine uses nine rotors [center right] to encrypt messages. A dual paper-tape printer is at the upper left. Growing up in New York City, I always wanted to be a spy.

But when I graduated from college in January , the Cold War and Vietnam War were raging, and spying seemed like a risky career choice. So I became an electrical engineer, working on real-time spectrum analyzers for a U. I was fascinated. Some years later, I had the good fortune of visiting the huge headquarters of the cipher machine company Crypto AG CAG , in Steinhausen, Switzerland, and befriending a high-level cryptographer there. My friend gave me an internal history of the company written by its founder, Boris Hagelin.

It mentioned a cipher machine, the HX Like the Enigma, the HX was an electromechanical cipher system known as a rotor machine. It was the only electromechanical rotor machine ever built by CAG, and it was much more advanced and secure than even the famous Enigmas. In fact, it was arguably the most secure rotor machine ever built.

I longed to get my hands on one, but I doubted I ever would. Fast forward to I'm in a dingy third subbasement at a French military communications base. Accompanied by two-star generals and communications officers, I enter a secured room filled with ancient military radios and cipher machines.

I am amazed to see a Crypto AG HX, unrecognized for decades and consigned to a dusty, dimly lit shelf. I carefully extract the kilogram pound machine. There's a hand crank on the right side, enabling the machine to operate away from mains power. As I cautiously turn it, while typing on the mechanical keyboard, the nine rotors advance, and embossed printing wheels feebly strike a paper tape. I decided on the spot to do everything in my power to find an HX that I could restore to working order.

If you've never heard of the HX until just now, don't feel bad. Most professional cryptographers have never heard of it. Yet it was so secure that its invention alarmed William Friedman, one of the greatest cryptanalysts ever and, in the early s, the first chief cryptologist of the U. After reading a Hagelin patent more on that later , Friedman realized that the HX, then under development, was, if anything, more secure than the NSA's own KL-7 , then considered unbreakable.

The reasons for Friedman's anxiety are easy enough to understand. The HX had about 10 possible key combinations; in modern terms, that's equivalent to a 2,bit binary key. For comparison, the Advanced Encryption Standard , which is used today to protect sensitive information in government, banking, and many other sectors, typically uses a or a bit key. In the center of the cast-aluminum base of the HX cipher machine is a precision Swiss-made direct-current gear motor.

Also visible is the power supply [lower right] and the function switch [left], which is used to select the operating mode—for example, encryption or decryption. Peter Adams. A total of 12 different rotors are available for the HX, of which nine are used at any one time. Current flows into one of 41 gold-plated contacts on the smaller-diameter side of the rotor, through a conductor inside the rotor, out through a gold-plated contact on the other side, and then into the next rotor.

The incrementing of each rotor is programmed by setting pins, which are just visible in the horizontal rotor. Just as worrisome was that CAG was a privately owned Swiss company, selling to any government, business, or individual. But traffic encrypted by the HX would be unbreakable. Friedman and Hagelin were good friends. During World War II, Friedman had helped make Hagelin a very wealthy man by suggesting changes to one of Hagelin's cipher machines, which paved the way for the U.

Army to license Hagelin's patents. The resulting machine, the MB , became a workhorse during the war, with some , units fielded. Hagelin agreed not to sell his most secure machines to countries specified by U. He convinced Hagelin not to manufacture the new device, even though the machine had taken more than a decade to design and only about 15 had been built, most of them for the French army.

However, was an interesting year in cryptography. Machine encryption was approaching a crossroads; it was starting to become clear that the future belonged to electronic encipherment. Even a great rotor machine like the HX would soon be obsolete. That was a challenge for CAG, which had never built an electronic cipher machine. Introduced in , the machine was a failure. Also in , Hagelin's son Bo, who was the company's sales manager for the Americas and who had opposed the transaction, died in a car crash near Washington, D.

Although the H was a failure, it was succeeded by a machine called the H, of which thousands were sold. The H was designed with NSA assistance.

To generate random numbers, it used multiple shift registers based on the then-emerging technology of CMOS electronics. This mathematical algorithm was created by the NSA, which could therefore decrypt any messages enciphered by the machine.