Ibm technologies. ComputerPress. The beginning of the era of personal computers

The most important achievement of the 20th century is the creation of the IBM PC, which had a huge impact on the development of the computer industry. This event not only became the starting point in the creation of personal computers, but also significantly affected the fate of Microsoft. The deal, struck between IBM and Microsoft, turned the latter from a run-of-the-mill firm to a giant in the computer industry, and Bill Gates to the richest man on the planet.
In this article, we will share interesting details of this deal that have not yet been widely publicized.

Quite a lot of articles are devoted to IBM and Microsoft both in print publications and on various Internet resources. It would seem, what new can be reported about them? After all, in the history of these companies there are no white spots ... or almost none? However, let's not get ahead of ourselves and, in order to be completely consistent, we will briefly outline the history of these companies. In fairness to historical justice, we, of course, start with IBM, which is one of the oldest (if not the oldest) firms in the computer market.

IBM

The history of IBM (International Business Machines) dates back to the beginning of the last century. Currently, the American firm IBM is one of the world's largest corporations engaged in the production of servers and software, as well as research and development in various fields of science. The company is headquartered in Armonk (New York State).

Of course, a small article is not enough to fully describe the history of IBM, so we will not go into chronological details, but only try to give a general idea of \u200b\u200bit.

The company was officially formed in 1911, but received its current name only in 1924. However, if we are not talking about the date of registration of the company, but precisely about its history, then it is worth starting with the invention by Herman Hollerith of an electric machine for processing data using perforated cards. Herman Hollerith was an employee of the United States Census Bureau and proposed to automate the statistics of immigrants using punched cards, processed on electromechanical punching machines. Subsequently, Hollerith's paper punched cards served as the basis for data storage systems and were actively used until the 50s of the XX century.

Hollerith's invented electromechanical punching machine was so successful that in 1896 he was able to create a company called the Tabulating Machine Co.

15 years later, in 1911, financier Charles Flint merged Tabulating Machine Co, which by that time was on the verge of bankruptcy, with two of his companies. As a result, on June 15, 1911, a company called Computing Tabulating Recording (CTR) was registered in New York, which was later renamed IBM.

In 1914, Thomas J. Watson Sr. became CTR's general manager and successfully led the company for nearly 40 years.

CTR specialized in tabulators and other punching machines, and by 1919 had a turnover of $ 2 million.

The production of counting and punching machines remained the main focus of the company until 1952, when Thomas Watson Jr. took over as president of the company. It was then that the IBM company came to grips with the development and production of computers.

Omitting some facts from the history of IBM, fast forward to 1980, when events occurred that significantly influenced its future destiny.

By 1980, IBM was the largest computer company: it owned virtually half of all profits in the global computer market, and had 425,000 employees. However, American companies competing with IBM had already begun manufacturing and selling small home computers called microcomputers. It is reliably known that by 1980 at least 200 thousand of such devices were sold in the United States. And this new direction developed without the participation of the market leader - IBM. One should not assume that her leadership sat idly by and indifferently watched the development of the situation. As Paul Carrol, author of Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM, recalls, IBM made two or three major attempts to design a microcomputer, all of which were unsuccessful.

So a group of engineers from the IBM Special Projects department in Boca Reton, Florida told IBM executives that they had found a solution. Until then, IBM had always made all the components for its computers in-house. The engineers decided to change this strategy and proposed to produce computers using separate components from other manufacturers. Administrator Bill Lowe was promoting this idea.

“This is the first time we have recommended that IBM management change policy and use third-party software and hardware in their products,” recalls Bill Lowe. IBM management hesitated for a long time before making a final decision. And in order to test how viable this idea is, an initiative group led by Bill Lowe was instructed to prepare for the development of a microcomputer. The collection of all the components necessary for its creation was handled by the administrator of the special projects department, Jack Sams. This is how he recalls the events of that time: “I remember that the first meeting was scheduled for Sunday. There were 13 of us, and we were told that we were given 30 days to prepare a program for creating and testing a new system ”.

However, here we will interrupt the story in order to tell about Microsoft, since it is with it that the further history of IBM is connected.

Microsoft

Microsoft's history is, of course, shorter than that of IBM - it begins on April 4, 1975. It was then that in Albuquerque, New Mexico, childhood friends Paul Allen and Bill Gates registered a software development company called Microsoft.

Bill Gates, then a 20-year-old boy, dropped out of college to get serious about programming and working in his own company. While still in college, he made a living by programming. Plus, Gates turned out to be a talented and rather adventurous entrepreneur. Here is how "flattering" Stephen Maines, the author of the biography of Gates, speaks of him: "He hired teenagers who worked for him and sold their work, paying them pennies and ripping exorbitant prices from clients."

Even before Microsoft was formed, Gates and Alain created the Basic programming language, which they sold to MITS, the first to develop the personal computer, Altair.

In 1977, Microsoft released its first product, the Fortran programming language, to run on the CP / M operating system. In April 1978, the company created the Cobol-80 programming language to work with the 8080, 8085, and Z-80 microprocessors, and in October of the same year, Apple and Radio Shack bought the rights to use and licensed Basic from Microsoft.

The company rose to prominence on April 4, 1978, with a million dollar prize for developing Basic, the first high-level programming language for 16-bit processors.

By 1980, Microsoft had 30 employees, including Sales Director Mark Ursino.

“I've always admired Bill Gates' ability to talk about literally everything. He was an excellent conversationalist, and you always felt that he was listening to you attentively. He analyzed your words and evaluated you to see if you could benefit his company, ”recalls Mark Ursino.

Another Microsoft employee was Bob O'Reir, 35, who was previously a computer engineer at NASA. Although he was 10 years older than his colleagues and had academic degrees in mathematics and astrophysics, he quickly got used to the democratic environment at Microsoft.

“We went to work in anything. The clothes were loose - Bermuda pants or a tracksuit. The atmosphere in the company was relaxed, like in a bachelor student fraternity, ”recalls Bob O'Reir.

Microsoft's office was located in Bellevue, a suburb of Seattle, in a small office in a bank building, and the atmosphere in the company completely contradicted the image of business America: the accountant worked barefoot, the receipts were stored in a shoebox.

Deal between IBM and Microsoft

Bill Lowe, who led the IBM personal computer initiative, instructed Jack Sams to contact Microsoft. Why this particular company was chosen - history is silent, but the fact remains: it was Microsoft that came to the attention of IBM. Jack Sams' task was to find two programs: a programming language and an operating system for the future PC.

On July 21, 1980, the morning after receiving the assignment, Jack Sams called Bill Gates and made an appointment. This phone call has become a pivotal moment in US business. IBM by that time had annual revenues of $ 26 billion. Net income was $ 3.6 billion. Microsoft at that time had practically nothing.

On July 22, Jack Sams and other IBM representatives arrived at 10800, 8th and 108th streets in Bellevue. They went up to the eighth floor and walked into office 819, where Microsoft was located, and asked Bill Gates.

“A young man who looked like a courier came out of the back room and said, 'Come in here.' Going into the office, I asked if I could see Bill Gates, recalls Jack Sams, and only then I realized that this was not a courier, but Bill Gates himself. "

Sams's job was to get an opinion of Gates and Microsoft, while keeping IBM's plans as quiet as possible.

“During the conversation, Gates was very tense and focused. He didn’t even care about the tie strayed to one side, ”- this is how Jack Sams comments on their first meeting.

Sams refrained from discussing the details of the project, but realized that Microsoft could provide them with both a programming language and an operating system.

“Now all we had to do was go back and convince the company's management to complete the deal with Microsoft,” recalls Jack Sams.

On August 6, 1980, on the recommendation of Sams, Bill Lowe presented to the IBM management the idea of \u200b\u200bcreating a microcomputer based on third-party components and software from Microsoft. Not everyone in the company's management supported this idea, but ... Frank Carey, Chairman of the Board of Directors, liked it. He gave Bill Lowe a free hand. Lowe and Sams got a year to build, test, and market the microcomputer.

The success of Low's department promised IBM a key position in a new market and billions of dollars in profits. However, nobody at IBM suspected that Gates' team was unable to fulfill the order - the new operating system that was expected from Microsoft simply did not exist.

A month after his first visit to a fledgling computer firm, Jack Sams returned to Bellevue. On August 21, 1980, he arrived for a meeting with Gates and his staff.

Sams explained in detail what IBM is going to produce and what the hardware of a personal computer will look like. He wanted to purchase two products from Microsoft: a programming language and an operating system. Gates said that IBM can get the Basic programming language from Microsoft and there is no problem with that. However, the operating system was in serious trouble. “There is only one firm,” explained Gates, “that can do this. And this firm is not Microsoft. " Gates was confident that only Digital Research could develop the operating system IBM needed.

Digital Research had a pretty good operating system designed to work with 8-bit processors, and all that was required was to redesign it for a 16-bit processor.

Gates immediately called Gary Kildell, head of Digital Research, and made an appointment with Jack Sams the next day.

“When the IBM representatives left, Bill was beside himself. We understood that such a deal with IBM, if all goes well, would completely change the face of our company, ”recalls Microsoft Sales Director Mark Ursino.

On August 22, 1980, Jack Sams arrived in California to meet with Gary Kildell. However, negotiations with the owner of Digital Research were unsuccessful. Gary Kildell refused to sign a unilateral secrecy agreement for the IBM project. IBM representatives insisted that they can divulge information obtained from Digital Research, but not vice versa. As a result, the deal between IBM and Digital Research fell through. Desperately, Sams called Bill Gates and said that they could not agree with Digital Research, and also said that they would have to cancel the deal if Gates did not get the operating system, since a computer without an operating system is worthless.

Two weeks later, Gates' companion Paul Allan found a way out. Half an hour from Microsoft's office in the Tukwila suburb, the owner of the Seattle Computer hardware store had a rather crude, homebrew operating system. The store was owned by amateur programmer Rod Brock.

“The firm was supported by two techies - me and Tim Patterson. Tim and I tried to act like business people, but we were just techies, ”recalls Rod Brock.

Programmer Tim Patterson, 25, created an operating system in just four months and called it the Quick and Dirty Operating System (QDOS).

QDOS was only suitable as a draft for the future IBM operating system. It required significant changes, but the finished kernel saved many months of work. To fine-tune the operating system from the same Seattle Computer, Tim Patterson was invited.

On September 22, 1980, Paul Allan called Rod Brock and offered him to sell the QDOS license, to which he agreed, setting a price of $ 10,000.Gates contacted IBM and offered two options: he either buys the QDOS license himself, or IBM does it. IBM chose Microsoft to do it.

The next step was the preparation of an official proposal from IBM - the largest business proposal received in the history of Microsoft. Everything had to be prepared a week before the meeting in Florida.

On the evening of September 29, 1980, on the eve of the submission of the official proposal, Bill Gates with the director of the company Steve Ballmer and the chief programmer Bob O'Reir were working on the documents.

“We finished writing the proposal, took it out of the printer, put it in a folder and hurried to the airport,” recalls Bob O'Reir.

Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and Bob O'Rare were the last passengers to board the overnight flight to Miami. They flew to Miami on September 30, 1980 at 7 a.m. The meeting was scheduled for 10 o'clock. There were three hours before her.

As it turned out upon arrival, Gates did not even have a tie, which was absolutely necessary for a business meeting (and later it turned out that he did not even know how to tie it). Before visiting IBM, it was decided to go to the mall and dress Gates appropriately. But, as luck would have it, the shopping center opened at exactly 10 o'clock, so Gates and his companions came to the meeting with IBM representatives 20 minutes late.

The meeting with IBM representatives took place in Boka Raton. IBM had new scheduling requirements, so discussions on Microsoft's proposal had to be postponed to the next day.

Finally, on October 1, Gates was ready to close the deal. Jack Sams, who was kind to Gates, took him aside and whispered: “Don't be shy, ask for more. We know it is expensive and it must be expensive. If you want a million dollars, we will give you a million. "

But ... Bill didn't need a million dollars. Gates surprised IBM with his proposal: he asked for only 400 thousand for a license for the Basic computer language and was ready to attach QDOS to it for free, but under the following conditions: he was paid one dollar for each computer sold by IBM and given the opportunity to sell his software to other computer manufacturers. IBM agreed to these terms, making the biggest strategic mistake in its history. IBM was skeptical about the personal computer market, naively believing that it would never become widespread, and therefore felt that the conditions of Mcirosoft were quite acceptable.

After two days of negotiations, Gates left Boca Reton, making a verbal agreement with IBM. For IBM, this deal was very cheap, and Gates, having stipulated the possibility of selling software to other firms, actually got a machine for printing money.

However, Gates missed something: he did not have time to conclude an agreement with Seattle Computer to use the QDOS operating system, and therefore sold IBM a product that did not belong to him. And Rod Brock of Seattle Computer could have abandoned the verbal agreement with Microsoft.

On November 10, Paul Allan was tasked with making a deal with Seattle Computer's Rod Brock. According to the verbal agreement, Brock was entitled to a certain amount whenever Gates entered into a new contract for the release of computers based on QDOS. Microsoft agreed to pay Seattle Computer $ 10,000 for each new contract. At the same time, Brock naively believed that Microsoft would be able to sell the system to at least a dozen companies. But Microsoft only had one client - IBM, which Rod Brock had never even known about.

Before the final conclusion of the deal, Gates unexpectedly decided to amend the contract with Seattle Computer. By prior arrangement, Gates had a non-exclusive license agreement for the QDOS operating system. Now he wanted to be the only QDOS seller, arguing that the exclusive rights to use QDOS would allow Microsoft to increase sales. Within two weeks, Gates and his lawyers prepared a new version of the agreement on the transfer of the license for the QDOS operating system.

On July 10, 1981, a version of the contract was sent to Seattle Computer, which included the following paragraph: "Microsoft becomes the sole owner of QDOS."

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer met with Rod Brock to finalize the deal, while he persuaded Brock that the sale of QDOS was beneficial to Seattle Computer, as it could sell computers with the improved QDOS operating system and receive all future improvements for free. Even more tempting was the financial part of the proposal. By signing the agreement, Brock received from Microsoft $ 50 thousand. In need of money, on July 27, 1981, Brock agreed to Microsoft's terms and signed the agreement. The QDOS system was now fully owned by Microsoft.

While Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer were sorting things out with Seattle Computer, programmers under Bob O'Reir's leadership continued to tweak the QDOS operating system to make it compatible with the IBM computer. The new, improved operating system was named MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System).

On August 12, 1981, two weeks after signing the contract for the purchase of QDOS, IBM released its first personal computer. When designing it, the principle of open architecture was applied: the components were universal, which made it possible to modernize the computer in parts. In the IBM PC, developments of other companies were used, for example, the i8088 microprocessor from Intel.

The official presentation of the IBM PC took place on September 12, 1981 in New York, and its announced base price was $ 1,565. No one knew what would come of it.

Sales began in October 1981, and by the end of the year, more than 35 thousand cars were sold. However, the market was demanding more and more. Five years later, PC production reached 3 million units. Competitors copied the design of IBM computers and began producing their own PC models. Because Bill Gates could sell his software without restriction, IBM's competitors bought both the MS-DOS operating system and the Basic programming language, which made Gates a millionaire almost instantly.

Nobody expected such a demand for personal computers, so IBM did not guess in time to secure full rights to the MS-DOS operating system. As a result, today the market value of IBM, which could own the entire computer market, is half the value of Microsoft, which, with the rights to the operating system, has grown from a small company to a global corporation worth more than $ 200 billion.

What is MOM

The state in which many domestic enterprises find themselves can be called a transition from "island" automation to the creation of unified information systems covering several different fields of activity, and often interacting with the information systems of other enterprises (business partners, suppliers of certain resources, etc. etc.). This process is unlikely to be painless - it will often be accompanied by additional organizational processes associated with the introduction of new technologies, such as the appearance or disappearance of jobs, changes in the job responsibilities of employees, the need for their training, etc. One should not ignore such an important fact as the rapid development and change of technologies, as well as the change in the business of the enterprises themselves. This often leads to the fact that the enterprise is forced to constantly modernize one or another part of the operating information system.

In this situation, it becomes especially urgent to solve the problem of integrating existing applications, including those operating under the control of various operating systems. Application integration projects consume up to 30% of enterprise IT spending, according to Forrester Research.

There are many different ways to create distributed applications that run on different platforms, such as using COM or CORBA technologies, create Web applications, and create and use Web services to get application results. The advancement of modern technologies implies, in most cases, the replacement of existing systems with new ones. At the same time, a Messaging Oriented Middleware (MOM) application integration approach means preserving and integrating existing systems, and therefore significant savings and investment. Many analysts in the computer industry have noted a rapid increase in the number of solutions using MOM due to the flexibility of this architecture. This is the way of integration implemented in the IBM MQSeries product family.

Message queuing tools are designed to store messages sent by applications and then deliver them to another application using a special server application - a queue manager. The queue manager writes a message to a local queue and then transmits it over the network to another queue manager that contains a so-called target queue for the destination application. The destination application accesses the target queue and accesses the message. Thus, the message queuing system provides an asynchronous method of communication between programs that does not require direct communication between them. This ensures that the transmitted message will not be lost or received twice.

The tasks of exchanging data between various applications arise quite often, and ten to twenty years ago, to solve them, developers created their own data export and import modules. These modules were essentially the predecessors of MOM. With the development of applied information systems, the need arose to create a universal infrastructure that would provide such an exchange. This need was the reason for the creation of MOM.

In 1992, IBM published the Message Queue Interface (MQI) programming interface specification, and a family of products called MQSeries has existed since that year. During the existence of these products, versions of queue managers have appeared for all popular server platforms, including OS / 390, MVS, VSE / ESA, OS / 400, OS / 2, OpenVMS, Digital Unix, AIX, HP-UX, SunOS, Sun Solaris, SCO UNIX, UnixWare, AT&T GIS UNIX, DC / OSx, Windows 2000, Windows NT, Windows 95/98, and even more platform versions of MQSeries clients. Recently, there have been tools for integrating MQSeries with relational DBMS, combining queue managers into clusters, and various programming interfaces that simplify the development of applications using MQSeries.

Currently the IBM MQSeries product family (Figure 1) contains:

• MQSeries - message queuing and processing facility;
• MQSeries Integrator - Application Integration Tool;
• MQSeries Workflow - a tool for managing business processes;
• MQSeries Adapter - a tool for creating adapters, that is, transitional software between application systems and MQSeries;
• MQSeries.EveryPlace is a message queuing service for mobile devices and mobile users.

Below we will look at the purpose and main features of each of these products.

IBM MQSeries

IBM MQSeries, one of IBM's flagship products, is a platform-independent and operating-system independent message queuing and processing facility in a heterogeneous, distributed environment. The simplest diagram of the IBM MQSeries is shown in Fig. 2.

When a user requests the transmission of a message to Application 1, MQSeries writes the message to the local send queue to remote systems and then sends it over the network to the remote target queue. The destination program (Appendix 2) reads the target queue and accesses the message. Thus, custom applications do not have to deal with the internal structure of queues and with the means of communication between queue managers.

MQSeries messages are a data structure consisting of a message header that contains information about the characteristics of the message intended for message managers (information about the sender and recipient, about the route of the message, about the queue to which the response should be delivered), and the data transferred (if if necessary, they can be converted from one format to another).

A message queue is a means of storing and processing messages. In order to increase the reliability of their transmission, messages can be logged.

Applications using MQSeries do not access them directly - message queues can only be accessed through a few alternative APIs: MQI (Message Queue Interface), AMI (Application Message Interface), JMS (Java Message Service), CMI (Common Message Interfaсe). These interfaces can be used with C, C ++, Java, Smalltalk, Cobol, PL / 1, Lotus LSX, Basic, as well as with the most popular development tools VisualAge, Delphi, PowerBuilder, Visual Basic.

Queue managers send messages using channels and a special Message Channel Protocol (MCP) that runs on top of lower layer transport protocols. The use of this protocol fully ensures the transmission of a message, including in the event of a system or network failure, since the message is removed from the queue only after the recipient confirms its receipt.

Note that MQSeries allows you to combine a group of sending and receiving messages into a single transaction. In this case, sent messages are invisible to other applications until the transaction is completed, and received messages are not removed from the queues. When a transaction is rolled back, the queues are returned to the state corresponding to the moment it started. Therefore, MQSeries queue managers can act as distributed transaction monitors and participate in distributed transactions under the control of other TP monitors.

MQSeries includes: a utility for administration and configuration of queues, message channels, security - MQSeries Explorer, a component for testing application programming interfaces - MQSeries API Exerciser, as well as interfaces designed to be embedded into other applications in order to add MQSeries administration capabilities. There are also third-party MQSeries administration utilities on the market.

In addition, MQSeries can be supplemented with message encryption tools, as well as other external modules, for example: MQSeries Link for SAP R / 3 - to integrate R / 3 with other applications or remote R / 3 systems; MQ Enterprise Integrator, MQSeries LSX, MQSeries Link, MQSeries Extra Link - for messaging between Lotus Notes and other systems using MQSeries; MQSeries Internet Gateway - for converting HTTP requests to MQSeries messages and vice versa.

However, it should be noted that in addition to delivering a message, the task of recognizing and processing its content is also important. To solve it, the MQSeries Integrator product is used, which will be devoted to the next section.

IBM MQSeries Integrator

IBM MQSeries Integrator is a message broker that processes and distributes message flows to applications, databases, and other recipients. It enables application integration by facilitating the exchange of data between applications running on different platforms.

MQSeries Integrator uses rules to implement intelligent business management across the enterprise and apply it to business events, and can dynamically process and route messages, for example, add data from corporate databases to transmitted information, store information in corporate databases, transform data, contained in messages, from one format to another. Data can be transferred in the "Publish / Subscribe" mode, as well as converted to XML format and vice versa. Data formats can be stored in dictionaries, including those supplied by independent manufacturers.

The MQSeries Integrator product consists of a graphical development environment for formats and message flow ControlCenter with a MessageRepository for message formats, a Configuration Manager management server, and a distributed system of Message Broker message servers that acts as a processor and router for MQSeries messages. Upon receiving a message, the Message Broker processes it in one way or another (depending on the content of the message) in accordance with the rules defined in the Message Broker configuration.

MQSeries Integrator contains tools for converting messages from one format to another, format descriptions, saving descriptions in appropriate databases, recognizing message parts according to the available formats. Format conversions can include adding or removing data, changing message headers, performing calculations, and performing user-defined functions. There are ready-made dictionaries of standard formats for MQSeries Integrator, for example, for SAP R / 3 and S.W.I.F.T.

In addition to format conversion tools, MQSeries Integrator contains tools for creating and applying message distribution rules based on the field values \u200b\u200bcontained in the message. A typical example of such a rule is sending a copy of a message to another recipient if the value of any message field is within a predetermined range (for example, if the transaction amount has exceeded some value). Note that the latest version of MQSeries Integrator allows third-party products to be used as a means of implementing certain message distribution rules.

The tools described above can be accessed using the appropriate API or graphical administrative tools (Figure 3).

To ensure data protection, the product includes a User Name Server, which is responsible for storing a list of users and user groups, as well as information about their rights to access data, messages and operations.

IBM MQSeries Workflow

IBM MQSeries Workflow is a workflow management tool that allows you to manage business processes, data, applications, and even people across the enterprise, including managing external partner relationships. This product is used to develop, improve, document and manage enterprise business processes. With this tool, you can document business processes, automate operations that do not require management, change processes as your business changes, send work lists to employees and provide the necessary information about the execution of certain processes.

The MQSeries Workflow product consists of server and client components.

Server components include the following servers:

• execution server - responsible for the timely movement of the desired position of the task to a specific employee. To achieve this goal, the server can start or stop processes, register events, save information about them in the database. Multiple copies of the runtime server can be used;
• administration Server - Manages other MQSeries Workflow server components and is responsible for their availability, functionality, and disaster recovery. The administration server is accessed through the MQSeries Workflow Administration Utility component;
• scheduling Server - Manages notifications for operations that must be completed within a specified time period
• server returning resources to the system - is responsible for the physical deletion of copies of processes that have been terminated;
• application Runtime Server - Calls server applications such as CICS and IMS transactions for execution. It is currently available on the OS / 390 platform.
• MQSeries Workflow client components include:
• BuildTime - with it you can create workflow models, for this purpose it includes a graphical editor for creating process models. In addition, this component can determine which personnel are involved in the process, which programs and data are used in the workflow. The created model can be saved or exported in a format convenient for documentation, and then converted into a template and transferred to the server components of MQSeries Workflow (Fig. 4);
• MQSeries Workflow Client - used to launch processes for editing work lists, managing copies of processes, changing job assignments, tracking the progress of processes. Instead of the ready-made client application that comes with MQSeries Workflow, you can also use your own ones - there is a corresponding API for this. The Program Execution Agent is used to launch external applications used to perform operations;
• MQSeries Workflow Client for Lotus Notes - designed to use Lotus Notes as an external working environment for MQSeries Workflow without any adaptation. This component allows you to provide Notes users with access to all MQSeries Workflow functions, and provides developers with an interface for embedding Lotus Notes functionality (forms, documents) into a workflow solution;
• Administration Utility is a utility for administering MQSeries Workflow server components.

IBM MQSeries Adapter

The IBM MQSeries Adapter is a tool for creating adapters, that is, transitional software between applications and MQSeries. The product consists of two components, the MQSeries Adapter Builder and the MQSeries Adapter Kernel, and two supporting components, the MQSeries Adapter Sets and the MQSeries Integrator Library.

The MQSeries Adapter Builder allows you to import an application interface into the repository by processing prototypes of structure description functions, allowing you to associate the data contained in a message with the data that the application should receive. This can be done either by reformatting the data or by using more complex transformations, such as calculating functions. The result of the tool's work is C code that can be compiled on the platforms where the application will function.

The MQSeries Adapter Kernel is the runtime libraries that adapters built with the Adapter Builder refer to.

MQSeries Adapter Sets are a set of standard adapters for SAP R / 3, Baan Ivb, and JD Edwards OneWorld. These adapters can be modified if necessary.

MQSeries Integrator Libraries allow MQSeries Integrator users to use it with adapters.

IBM MQSeries EveryPlace

IBM MQSeries EveryPlace is a message queuing service for mobile devices running Windows CE, Palm OS, mobile phones, and mobile users with computers running Windows that supports guaranteed information delivery between portable devices and interoperability with the standard infrastructure of MQSeries queue managers. This product is specially adapted for use on systems with minimal hardware resources and can be used on all platforms that support Java (Figure 5).

Conclusion

In this article, we looked at the features of the IBM MQSeries product family. We talked about the features of MQSeries as a means of organizing message queuing and processing them, as well as a number of products created on its basis, namely: about MQSeries Integrator - an application integration tool, MQSeries Workflow - a tool for managing business processes, MQSeries Adapter - a tool for creating transitional software between applications and MQSeries; and MQSeries EveryPlace, a message queuing service for mobile devices and mobile users. We have made sure that these products can serve as the basis for the creation of an enterprise information infrastructure or solutions that are part of such an infrastructure.

The corporation originated from a conglomerate of companies that produced tabulators and chronometers, formed before the First World War. Gradually, it became an international technological colossus, pioneered the development of electronic computers, and then, in the era of the mainframe, an absolute monopoly. Until the 70s, the corporation was headed by icons of American capitalism, Thomas Watson Sr. and Thomas Watson Jr.

Structure

As of January 2016, the following divisions operate within IBM:

• Global Technology Services
• Software
• Systems and Technology
• Global Financing

Compared to the beginning of 2015, the structure of the company has not changed.

IBM in Russia and CIS countries

Since 2006, an IBM development center has been operating in Russia.

Assets

Data centers

As of the end of 2014, the number of IBM data centers serving cloud infrastructure is 49.

Performance indicators

2019: Fall of revenue from $ 79.6 billion to $ 77.15 billion

Takeovers and sale of assets

Work and HR at IBM

Research and development

2018: Leadership on patents for 26 years

In early 2019, patent research company IFI Claims Patent Services published an annual ranking of the largest recipients of patents. IBM has been in the lead for 26 consecutive years. They are followed by Samsung, Canon, Intel and LG Electronics - the same five as in 2017.

According to data from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), in 2018, IBM received 9100 patents, of which almost half are related to the most talked about technologies in the IT market, such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing , information security, blockchain and quantum computing. Ginny Rometty, chairman of the board of directors, president and CEO of IBM, said these inventions demonstrate the company's commitment to "solving problems that many have not even thought about."

Among the patents granted by IBM in 2018, there are solutions aimed at improving communication between AI and humans (Project Debater); improving the quality of control of aquatic ecosystems to protect marine flora and fauna; systems for combating voice phishing schemes. Arvind Krishna, senior vice president of Hybrid Cloud and director of IBM Research, said in an IBM blog that the focus in 2018 was on climate change mitigation.

According to IFI Claims Patent Services, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted a total of 308,853 patents in 2018, down 3.5% from 2017. Chinese companies have increased the total number of granted patents by 12% compared to 2017. Bloomberg notes that the steady rise in the number of patents granted to Chinese companies reflects an increase in their development of their own technologies.

With 9,100 patents, IBM holds 6.4% of the total number of patents granted to companies in the United States. New patents have been granted to more than 8,500 IBM inventors in 47 different states and 48 countries.

A noticeable decrease was shown by Sony (15th place in the ranking, a decrease in the number of patents received by 21% compared to 2017), Google (11th place, minus 16%) and Qualcomm (8th place, minus 12%). Facebook, which made it into the top 50 for the first time in 2017, dropped out of the shortlist altogether.

2016: Leadership in the number of new patents

In January 2017, it became known that IBM retained its leadership in the number of new patents for 25 years in a row. This was reported by the research agency IFI Claims Patent Services.

In 2017, IBM registered more than 9 thousand patents, while Samsung Electronics followed by 5.8 thousand. Canon (3.3 thousand patents) entered the top three.

According to IFI Claims Patent Services, in 2017 the US Patent Office issued more than 320 thousand patents, which is 5.2% more than a year earlier. Over the past 10 years, the number of registered patents in the country has doubled, Bloomberg said.

Although patents are being filed in other countries, the USA is the absolute world leader in this regard. All large international corporations strive to patent their developments here.

In 2017, most of IBM's inventions were in artificial intelligence (AI), cognitive computing, cloud computing, cybersecurity, and other strategically important areas. For example, AI had over 1,400 patents. Some of them describe technologies for human speech analysis and machine learning for self-driving cars.

From 2012 to 2017, IBM received over 5,600 AI-related patents, which is 1,000 more documents than Google's.

2015

7,355 US patents

IBM's 2013 patent portfolio includes a variety of inventions that will help the company maintain its leadership position in areas such as cognitive technology, cloud computing and analytics. These inventions will also allow us to move to a new stage in the development of cognitive systems, during which computers can learn, draw conclusions and interact with us in a more natural, personalized manner.

The number of IBM patents granted in 2013 exceeded the total number of patents awarded to Amazon, Google, EMC, Intel, Oracle / SUN, and Symantec. More than 8,000 IBM inventors in 47 US states and 41 other countries contributed to the record-breaking patent portfolio in 2013.

The list of the top ten recipients of patents * in the United States in 2013 is as follows: which allowed the corporation to top the global list of companies with the most active inventive activity for the 18th consecutive year.

Another patent describes a system for predicting traffic conditions based on the analysis of information exchanged via short-range wireless communication channels. It is hoped that this invention will help to alert drivers to emergency road conditions.

Also in 2010, the company patented a methodology for collecting and analyzing data from sensors in computer hard drives for high-precision analysis of seismic events, in particular earthquakes, which makes it possible to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of emergency response in case of natural disasters.

One of the patents, which IBM notes among the most interesting, was obtained by a native of Russia Yuri Vlasov, who in the 1990s worked at the A.F. Ioffe Physics and Technology Institute in St. Petersburg, and since 2001 is an employee of the IBM TJ laboratory Watson Research Center, located in New York State, USA.

The patent, obtained by Vlasov together with Solomon Assefa, Walter Bedell and Fengnian Xia, describes a technology that allows computer chips to communicate using pulses of light instead of electrical signals, which makes it possible to improve the performance of computing systems. ...

In total, more than 7,000 IBM inventors from 46 different states in the United States and 29 countries have contributed to obtaining patents. Non-US inventors at IBM contributed to more than 22% of the company's total patent portfolio for 2010, up 27% over the past 3 years.

“The patents, like the inventions they represent, reflect the continuing commitment to innovation that distinguishes IBM and its people,” said Kevin Reardon, general manager of Intellectual Property at IBM and vice president of research development. "Patent leadership is an essential element of our strategy, which is focused on building a technologically advanced, interconnected and intelligent infrastructure that can change how diverse systems work to support a smarter planet."

»IBM Watson Hitachi (Hitachi Global Storage Technologies).

• Soviet ES computers are directly and creatively copied from IBM / 360 computers;
• ES PC analogs of personal computers IBM;
• The operating systems of the ES computers were at least compatible with the corresponding operating systems of IBM.

IBM is known to many today. She left a huge imprint on computer history, and even today her pace in this difficult business has not slowed down. The most interesting thing is that not everyone knows what IBM is so famous for. Yes, everyone has heard about the IBM PC, about the fact that it made laptops, that once it seriously competed with Apple. However, among the merits of the blue giant there is a huge number of scientific discoveries, as well as the introduction of various inventions into everyday life. Sometimes many people wonder where this or that technology came from. And everything from there is from IBM. Five Nobel laureates in physics received their prizes for inventions made within the walls of this company.

This material is intended to shed light on the history of the formation and development of IBM. At the same time, we will talk about her key inventions, as well as future developments.

Formation time

The origins of IBM go back to 1896, when, decades before the appearance of the first electronic computers, the outstanding engineer and statistician Herman Hollerith founded a company for the production of calculating machines, christened TMC (Tabulating Machine Company). To this, Mr. Hollerith, a descendant of German émigrés, who was openly proud of his roots, was prompted by the success of his first calculating machines of his own production. The essence of the invention of the grandfather of the "blue giant" was that he developed an electrical switch that allows data to be encoded in numbers. The carriers of information in this case were cards in which holes were punched in a special order, after which the punched cards could be sorted mechanically. This development, patented by Herman Hollerith in 1889, created a sensation, which allowed the 39-year-old inventor to receive an order to supply his unique machines to the US Department of Statistics, which was preparing for the 1890 census.

The success was overwhelming: processing the collected data took only one year, as opposed to the eight years it took statisticians from the US Census Bureau to obtain the results of the 1880 census. It was then that the advantage of computing mechanisms in solving such problems was demonstrated in practice, which largely predetermined the future "digital boom". The funds earned and the contacts established helped Mr. Hollerith to create the TMC company in 1896. At first, the company tried to produce commercial cars, but on the eve of the 1900 census, it repurposed to produce calculating machines for the US Census Bureau. However, three years later, when the state "trough" was closed, Herman Hollerith again turned his attention to the commercial application of his developments.

Although the company was undergoing a period of rapid growth, the health of its creator and mastermind steadily deteriorated. This made him in 1911 accept the offer of the millionaire Charles Flint (Charles Flint) to buy TMC. The deal was valued at $ 2.3 million, of which Hollerith received $ 1.2 million. In fact, it was not about a simple purchase of shares, but about the merger of TMC with ITRC (International Time Recording Company) and CSC (Computing Scale Corporation), as a result of which the CTR (Computing Tabulating Recording) corporation was born. She became the prototype of modern IBM. And if Herman Hollerith is called by many the grandfather of the "blue giant", then it is Charles Flint who is considered to be his father.

Mr. Flint was undeniably a financial genius with a knack for anticipating strong corporate alliances, many of which have outlived their creators and continue to play a defining role in their respective fields. He took an active part in the creation of the Pan-American rubber manufacturer U. S. Rubber, one of the once leading global manufacturers of American Chicle chewing gum (since 2002, already called Adams, it is part of Cadbury Schweppes). For his success in consolidating US corporate power, he was called the "father of trusts." However, for the same reason, the assessment of its role, in terms of positive or negative impact, but never in terms of significance, is very ambiguous. Paradoxically, Charles Flint's organizational abilities were highly valued in government departments, and he always found himself where ordinary officials could not act openly or their work was less effective. In particular, he is credited with participating in a secret project to buy ships around the world and convert them into warships during the Spanish-American War of 1898.

Created by Charles Flint, CTR Corporation in 1911 produced a wide range of unique equipment, including time tracking systems, scales, automatic meat cutters and, which turned out to be especially important for creating a computer, punched card equipment. In 1914, Thomas J. Watson Sr. took over as CEO, and in 1915 he became president of CTR.

The next major event in the history of CTR was the change of name to International Business Machines Co., Limited, or IBM for short. This happened in two stages. First, in 1917, the company entered the Canadian market under this brand. Apparently, by this she wanted to emphasize the fact that she is now a real international corporation. In 1924, IBM became known as the American division.

The time of the Great Depression and World War II

The next 25 years in the history of IBM were more or less stable. Even during the Great Depression in the United States, the company continued its activities at the same pace, with virtually no layoffs, which could not be said about other firms.

Several important events for IBM can be noted in this period. In 1928 the company introduced a new type of punch card with 80 columns. It was called the IBM Card and has been used by the company's calculating machines over the past several decades, and then by its computers. Another significant event for IBM during this time was a large government order to systematize data on jobs for 26 million people. The company itself recalls it as "the largest settlement transaction of all time." It also opened the door for the blue giant to other government orders, just like in the early days of TMC.

Book "IBM and the Holocaust"

There are several references to IBM's collaboration with the Nazi regime in Germany. The source of the data here is the book "IBM and the Holocaust" by Edwin Black. Its name clearly says for what purpose the calculating machines of the blue giant were used. They kept statistics on the Jews imprisoned. There are even codes that were used to organize the data: Code 8 - Jews, Code 11 - Gypsies, Code 001 - Auschwitz, Code 001 - Buchenwald, and so on.

However, according to the IBM leadership, the company only sold equipment to the Third Reich, and how it was used further does not concern them. By the way, many American companies have done this. IBM even opened a plant in Berlin in 1933, when Hitler came to power. However, there is also a downside to the use of IBM equipment by the Nazis. After the defeat of Germany, thanks to the machines of the blue giant, it was possible to trace the fate of many people. Although this did not stop various groups of people affected by the war and the Holocaust in particular, demanding an official apology from IBM. The company refused to bring them. Even in spite of the fact that during the war its employees, who remained in Germany, continued their work, even communicating with the firm's management through Geneva. However, IBM itself disclaimed any responsibility for the activities of its enterprises in Germany during the war from 1941 to 1945.

In the United States, during the war period, IBM worked for the government and not always in its direct line of business. Its production facilities and workers were busy producing rifles (in particular the Browning Automatic Rifle and M1 Carbine), bomb scopes, engine parts, etc. Thomas Watson, who was still at the head of the company, set a nominal profit margin for this product at 1%. And even this minuscule was sent not to the piggy bank of the blue giant, but to the foundation of a fund to help widows and orphans who lost their loved ones in the war.

It was also used for calculating machines located in the States. They were used for various mathematical calculations, logistics and other war needs. They were no less actively used when working on the Manhattan project, within the framework of which the atomic bomb was created.

Time of large mainframes

The beginning of the second half of the last century was of great importance for the modern world. Then the first digital computers began to appear. And IBM took an active part in their creation. The very first American programmable computer was the Mark I (full name Aiken-IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator Mark I). The most amazing thing is that it was based on the ideas of Charles Babbage, the inventor of the first computing machine. By the way, he never finished building it. But in the 19th century, this was difficult to do. IBM took advantage of his calculations, shifted them to the technologies of that time, and the Mark I saw the light. It was built in 1943, and a year later it was officially put into operation. The history of "Markov" did not last long. In total, four modifications were released, the last of which, the Mark IV, was introduced in 1952.

In the 1950s, IBM received another major order from the government to develop computers for the SAGE (Semi Automatic Ground Environment) system. It is a military system designed to track and intercept potential enemy bombers. This project allowed the blue giant to gain access to research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Then he worked on the first computer, which could easily serve as the prototypes of modern systems. So it included a built-in screen, a magnetic memory array, supported digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital conversions, had a kind of computer network, could transmit digital data over a telephone line, and supported multiprocessing. In addition, it was possible to connect to it the so-called "light pistols", which were previously widely used as an alternative to the joystick for consoles and slot machines. There was even support for the first algebraic computer language.

IBM built 56 computers for the SAGE project. Each was worth $ 30 million at 50s prices. 7000 employees of the company worked on them, which at that time was 20% of the entire staff of the company. In addition to large profits, the blue giant was able to gain invaluable experience, as well as access to military developments. Later, all this was applied in the creation of computers of the next generations.

The next milestone for IBM was the release of the System / 360 computer. It is associated with almost the change of an entire era. Before him, the blue giant produced systems based on vacuum tubes. For example, after the aforementioned Mark I in 1948, the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC) was introduced, consisting of 21,400 relays and 12,500 vacuum tubes, capable of performing several thousand operations per second.

In addition to computers, SAGE IBM has worked on other projects for the military. Thus, the Korean War required the use of faster means of calculation than a large programmable calculator. This is how a completely electronic computer was developed (not from relays, but from lamps) IBM 701, which worked 25 times faster than SSEC, and at the same time took up four times less space. Over the next several years, the modernization of lamp computers continued. For example, the IBM 650 became famous, which produced about 2000 units.

No less significant for today's computer technology was the invention in 1956 of a device called the RAMAC 305. It became the prototype of what today bears the abbreviation HDD or just a hard disk. The first hard drive weighed about 900 kilograms, and its capacity was only 5 MB. The main innovation was the use of 50 aluminum circular continuously rotating plates, on which the data carriers were magnetized elements. This made it possible to provide random access to files, which at the same time significantly increased the speed of data processing. But this pleasure was not cheap - it cost $ 50,000 at the prices of the time. Over 50 years, progress has reduced the cost of one megabyte of data on an HDD from $ 10,000 to $ 0.00013, if we take the average cost of a 1TB hard drive.

The middle of the last century was also marked by the arrival of transistors to replace lamps. The blue giant began its first attempts to use these elements in 1958 with the announcement of the IBM 7070 system. Somewhat later, computers of the 1401 and 1620 models appeared. The first was intended for various business tasks, and the second was a small scientific computer used to develop the design of highways and bridges. That is, both more compact specialized computers and more bulky ones were created, but with a much higher system speed. An example of the former is the model 1440, developed in 1962 for small and medium-sized businesses, and an example of the latter is the 7094, which is actually a supercomputer of the early 60s, used in the aerospace industry.

Another building block on the way to creating System / 360 was the creation of terminal systems. Users were allocated a separate monitor and keyboard, which were connected to one central computer. Here's a prototype of a client / server architecture paired with a multiuser operating system.

As is often the case for the most effective use of innovation, you have to take all previous developments, find their points of contact, and then design a new system that uses the best aspects of new technologies. The IBM System / 360, introduced in 1964, became such a computer.

It is somewhat reminiscent of modern computers, which, if necessary, can be updated and to which various external devices can be connected. A new range of 40 peripherals has been developed for the System / 360. These included IBM 2311 and IBM 2314 hard drives, IBM 2401 and 2405 magnetic tape drives, punch card equipment, text recognition devices, and various communication interfaces.

Another important innovation is unlimited virtual space. Before System / 360, this kind of thing cost a lot of money. Of course, for this innovation, something had to be reprogrammed, but the result was worth it.

We wrote above about specialized computers for science and business. Agree, this is somewhat inconvenient for both the user and the developer. System / 360 became a versatile system that could be used for most tasks. Moreover, a much larger number of people could now use it - the simultaneous connection of up to 248 terminals was supported.

Building the IBM System / 360 wasn't all that cheap. The computer was only designed for three quarters, which was spent about a billion dollars. Another $ 4.5 billion was spent on investment in factories and new equipment for them. In total, five factories were opened and 60 thousand employees were hired. Thomas Watson Jr., who succeeded his father as president in 1956, called the project "the most expensive private commercial project in history."

70s and the era of the IBM System / 370

The next decade in IBM history was less revolutionary, but several important events took place. The 70s opened with the release of System / 370. After several System / 360 modifications, this system has become a more complex and serious rework of the original mainframe.

The most important innovation of System / 370 is support for virtual memory, that is, in fact, this is an expansion of RAM due to constant. Today this principle is actively used in modern operating systems of the Windows and Unix families. However, in the first versions of System / 370, its support was not included. IBM made virtual memory widely available in 1972 with the introduction of the System / 370 Advanced Function.

Of course, the list of innovations does not end there. The System / 370 series of mainframes supported 31-bit addressing instead of 24-bit. By default, dual-processor support was supported, and there was also compatibility with 128-bit fractional arithmetic. Another important "feature" of System / 370 is full backward compatibility with System / 360. Software course.

The next mainframe of the company was System / 390 (or S / 390), introduced in 1990. It was a 32-bit system, although it retained compatibility with System / 360 24-bit addressing and System / 370 31-bit addressing. In 1994, it became possible to combine multiple System / 390 mainframes into one cluster. This technology is called Parallel Sysplex.

After System / 390, IBM introduced the z / Architecture. Its main innovation is support for 64-bit address space. At the same time, new mainframes were released with a large number of processors (first 32, then 54). Z / Architecture was introduced in 2000, which is a completely new development. Today, System z9 and System z10 are available within its framework and continue to enjoy sustained popularity. What's more, they continue to maintain backward compatibility with System / 360 and later mainframes, which is a record of its kind.

That's where we close the topic of large mainframes, for which we have told about their history up to the present day.

Meanwhile, IBM is facing a conflict with the authorities. It was preceded by the departure of the main competitors of the blue giant from the market of large computer systems. In particular, NCR and Honeywall decided to focus on more profitable niche market segments. And System / 360 was so successful that no one could compete with it. As a result, IBM effectively became a monopoly in the mainframe market.

All of this on January 19, 1969 spilled over into a trial. As expected, IBM was accused of violating section 2 of the Sherman Act, which provides for liability for monopolization, or an attempt to monopolize the market for electronic computer systems, especially systems intended for use in business. The proceedings lasted until 1983 and ended for IBM with the fact that it seriously reconsidered its view of doing business.

It is possible that the antitrust proceedings influenced the "Future Systems project", in which it was supposed to once again combine all the knowledge and experience on past projects (just like in the days of System / 360) and create a new type of computer that will once again surpass everything previously systems made. Work on it was carried out between 1971 and 1975. The reasons for its closure are called economic inexpediency - according to analysts, it would not have fought back the way it happened with System / 360. Or maybe IBM really decided to hold back a bit because of the ongoing litigation.

Another very important event in the computer world is credited to the same decade, although it happened in 1969. IBM began selling software manufacturing services and the software itself separately from the hardware. Today, this hardly surprises anyone - even the modern generation of domestic users of pirated software are accustomed to the fact that programs have to be paid for. But then numerous complaints, press criticism, and at the same time lawsuits began to pour on the heads of the blue giant. As a result, IBM began to sell separately only application applications, while the software for controlling the operation of the computer (System Control Programming), in fact the operating system, was free.

And at the very beginning of the 80s, a certain Bill Gates from Microsoft proved that an operating system can also be paid.

Time of small personal computers

Until the 1980s, IBM was very active on large orders. Several times they were made by the government, several times by the military. As a rule, she supplied her mainframes to educational and scientific institutions, as well as to large corporations. It is unlikely that someone bought a separate System / 360 or 370 cabinet for themselves at home and a dozen of magnetic tape-based storage cabinets and already reduced a couple of times compared to the RAMAC 305 hard drives.

The blue giant was above the needs of the average consumer, who needs much less to be completely happy than NASA or another university. This gave a chance to stand on the feet of a semi-basement Apple company with the logo in the form of Newton holding an apple, soon replaced by a simply bitten apple. And Apple came up with a very simple thing - a computer for everyone. This idea was not supported by either Hewlett-Packard, where it was presented by Steve Wozniak, or other large IT companies of the time.

By the time IBM realized it, it was too late. The world has already admired the Apple II - the most popular and successful Apple computer in its history (not the Macintosh as many believe). But it's better late than never. It was not difficult to guess that this market is at the very beginning of its development. The result was the IBM PC (Model 5150). It happened on August 12, 1981.

Most strikingly, this was not the first IBM personal computer. The title of the first belongs to the 5100 model, released back in 1975. It was much more compact than mainframes, with a separate monitor, data storage and keyboard. But it was intended to solve scientific problems. For businessmen and simply lovers of technology, he did not fit well. And not least because of the price, which was around $ 20,000.

The IBM PC changed not only the world, but also the company's approach to building computers. Before that, IBM made any computing machine inside and out on its own, without the help of third parties. It turned out differently with the IBM 5150. At that time, the personal computer market was split between the Commodore PET, the Atari family of 8-bit systems, the Apple II, and the Tandy Corporation's TRS-80s. Therefore, IBM was in a hurry to seize the moment.

A 12-person team based in Boca Raton, Florida, led by Don Estrige, was commissioned to work on Project Chess (literally "Project Chess"). They completed the task in about a year. One of their key decisions was the use of third-party developments. This simultaneously saved a lot of money and time on their own scientific personnel.

Initially, Don chose the IBM 801 and a specially designed operating system for his processor. But a little earlier, the blue giant released the Datamaster microcomputer (full name System / 23 Datamaster or IBM 5322), which was based on the Intel 8085 processor (a slightly simplified modification of Intel 8088). This was the reason for choosing the Intel 8088 processor for the first IBM PC. The IBM PC even had expansion slots that matched those of the Datamaster. Well, Intel 8088 demanded a new DOS operating system, very timely proposed by a small company from Redmond called Microsoft. They did not make a new design for the monitor and printer. The monitor, previously created by the Japanese division of IBM, was chosen as the first, and the printer from Epson became the printing device.

The IBM PC was sold in a variety of configurations. The most expensive one cost $ 3005. It was equipped with an Intel 8088 processor running at 4.77 MHz, which, if desired, could be supplemented with an Intel 8087 coprocessor, which made floating point calculations possible. The amount of RAM was 64 KB. 5.25-inch floppy drives were supposed to be used as a permanent storage device. One or two of them could be installed. Later, IBM began supplying models that allowed the connection of cassette storage media.

The hard disk could not be installed in the IBM 5150 due to insufficient power supply. However, the company has a so-called "Expansion Unit" or Expansion Unit (also known as the IBM 5161 Expansion Chassis) with a 10 MB hard drive. He required a separate power source. In addition, a second HDD could be installed in it. It also had 5 expansion slots, while the computer itself had 8 more. But to connect the Expansion Unit, it was required to use Extender Card and Receiver Card, which were installed in the module and in the case, respectively. Other expansion slots of the computer were usually occupied by a video card, cards with I / O ports, etc. It was also possible to increase the amount of RAM up to 256 KB.

"Home" IBM PC

The cheapest configuration cost $ 1,565. Together with it, the buyer received the same processor, but the RAM was only 16 KB. There was no floppy drive included with the computer, and there was no standard CGA monitor. But there was an adapter for cassette drives and a video card focused on connecting to a TV. Thus, an expensive modification of the IBM PC was created for business (where, by the way, it became quite widespread), and a cheaper modification for the home.

But there was another novelty in the IBM PC - the basic input / output system or BIOS (Basic Input / Output System). It is still used in modern computers today, albeit in a slightly modified form. Newer motherboards already contain newer EFIs or even simplified Linux flavors, but it will definitely be a few years before BIOS disappears.

The architecture of the IBM PC was made open and publicly available. Any manufacturer could make peripherals and software for an IBM computer without purchasing any license. At the same time, the blue giant was selling the IBM PC Technical Reference Manual, where the full BIOS source code was posted. As a result, a year later, the world saw the first "IBM PC compatible" computers from Columbia Data Products. Compaq and other companies followed. The ice has broken.

IBM Personal Computer XT

In 1983, when the entire USSR celebrated International Women's Day, IBM released its next "male" product - IBM Personal Computer XT (short for eXtended Technology) or IBM 5160. The novelty replaced the original IBM PC, presented two years earlier. It represented the evolutionary development of personal computers. The processor was still the same, but the basic configuration already had 128 KB of RAM, and later 256 KB. The maximum size has grown to 640 KB.

The XT ships with one 5.25-inch drive, a 10MB Seagate ST-412 hard drive and a 130W PSU. Later, models with a 20 MB hard drive appeared. Well, PC-DOS 2.0 was used as the base OS. To expand the functionality, a new at that time 16-bit ISA bus was used.

IBM Personal Computer / AT

The AT chassis standard is probably remembered by many old-timers of the computer world. They were used until the end of the last century. It all started again with IBM and its IBM Personal Computer / AT or model 5170. AT stands for Advanced Technology. The new system was the second generation of the blue giant's personal computers.

The most important innovation of the novelty was the use of an Intel 80286 processor with a frequency of 6, and then 8 MHz. Many new computer capabilities were associated with it. In particular, it was a complete transition to a 16-bit bus and support for 24-bit addressing, which made it possible to bring the amount of RAM up to 16 MB. A 50-byte battery for powering the CMOS microcircuit appeared on the motherboard. Before that, she was not there either.

For data storage, 5.25-inch drives were now used with support for 1.2 MB floppy disks, while the previous generation provided a volume of no more than 360 KB. The hard drive now had a permanent capacity of 20MB and was twice as fast as its predecessor. The monochrome video card and monitors were replaced by adapters that support the EGA standard, capable of displaying up to 16 colors at a resolution of 640x350. Optionally, for professional work with graphics, it was possible to order a PGC video card (Professional Graphics Controller), worth $ 4290, capable of displaying up to 256 colors on a screen with a resolution of 640x480, and at the same time supporting 2D and 3D acceleration for CAD applications.

To support all this variety of innovations, the operating system had to be seriously modified, which came out under the name PC-DOS 3.0.

Not ThinkPad yet, not IBM PC

We believe that many people know that the Osborne 1, developed by the Osborne Computer Corporation, became the first portable computer in 1981. It was such a suitcase weighing 10.7 kg and costing $ 1795. The idea of \u200b\u200bsuch a device was not unique - its first prototype was developed back in 1976 at the Xerox PARC research center. However, by the mid-80s, sales of the Osborns had come to naught.

Of course, other companies quickly picked up the successful idea, which, in principle, is in the order of things - just remember what other ideas "stole" from Xerox PARC. In November 1982, Compaq announced plans to release a laptop. January saw the release of Hyperion, an MS-DOS-based computer somewhat reminiscent of Osborne 1. But it was not fully compatible with the IBM PC. This title was awarded to Compaq Portable, which appeared a couple of months later. In fact, it was an IBM PC combined in one case with a small screen and an external keyboard. The "suitcase" weighed 12.5 kg and was valued at over $ 4000.

IBM, clearly noticing that it was missing something, quickly got down to creating its primitive laptop. As a result, the IBM Portable Personal Computer or IBM Portable PC 5155 saw the light in February 1984. The novelty also largely resembled the original IBM PC, with the only exception that it had 256 KB of RAM. In addition, it was $ 700 cheaper than its Compaq counterpart, and at the same time had improved anti-theft technology - weighing 13.5 kg.

Two years later, progress has moved a couple more steps forward. IBM did not hesitate to take advantage of this, deciding to make its portable computers something more justifying its title. So in April 1986, the IBM Convertible or IBM 5140 appeared. The Convertible no longer looked like a suitcase, but a large case weighing only 5.8 kg. It cost about half the price - about $ 2000.

The good old Intel 8088 (or rather its updated version 80c88), clocked at 4.77 MHz, was used as a processor. But instead of 5.25-inch drives, 3.5-inch drives were used, capable of working with 720 KB disks. The amount of RAM was 256 KB, but it could be increased to 512 KB. But a far more important innovation was the use of a monochrome LCD display capable of 80x25 resolution for text or 640x200 and 320x200 for graphics.

The Convertible, on the other hand, had more modest expandability than the IBM Portable. There was only one ISA slot, while the first generation of the blue giant's portable PCs allowed installing almost as many expansion cards as a regular desktop computer (it still would not allow for such and such dimensions). This circumstance, as well as a passive screen without backlighting and the availability of more productive (or models with the same configuration, but available at a significantly lower price) analogs from Compaq, Toshiba and Zenith on the market did not make the IBM Convertible a popular solution. But it was manufactured until 1991 when it was replaced by the IBM PS / 2 L40 SX. Let's talk more about PS / 2.

IBM Personal System / 2

Until now, many of us use keyboards and even sometimes mice with PS / S interface. However, not everyone knows where he came from and how this abbreviation stands. PS / 2 is Personal System / 2, a computer introduced by IBM in 1987. He belonged to the third generation of the blue giant's personal computers, whose purpose was to reclaim lost positions in the PC market.

The IBM PS / 2 has failed. Its sales were supposed to be high, but the system was very innovative and closed, which automatically raised its final cost. Consumers preferred the more affordable clones of the IBM PC. However, the PS / 2 architecture has left a lot behind.

The main PS / 2 operating system was IBM OS / 2. For her, new PCs were equipped with two BIOSes at once: ABIOS (Advanced BIOS) and CBIOS (Compatible BIOS). The first was required to boot OS / 2, and the second was required for backward compatibility with IBM PC / XT / AT software. However, for the first few months, PS / 2 ships with PC-DOS. Later, Windows and AIX (one of the Unix variants) could be installed as an option.

Together with PS / 2, a new bus standard was introduced to expand the functionality of computers - MCA (Micro Channel Architecture). It was supposed to replace ISA. The speed of MCA corresponded to the PCI introduced a few years later. In addition, it had many interesting innovations, in particular, it supported the ability to exchange data directly between expansion cards, or simultaneously between multiple cards and a processor via a separate channel. All this later found application in the PCI-X server bus. MCA itself never got widespread due to IBM's refusal to license it, so that clones would not appear again. In addition, the new interface was not ISA compliant.

In those days, a DIN connector was used to connect a keyboard, and a COM connector for a mouse. New IBM personal computers offered to replace them with more compact PS / 2. Today these connectors are disappearing from modern motherboards, but then they were also available only to IBM. Only a few years later they "went to the masses." The point here is not only the closed nature of the technology, but also the need to update the BIOS to provide full support for this interface.

PS / 2 made an important contribution to the video card market. Prior to 1987, there were several types of monitor connectors. They often had many contacts, the number of which was equal to the number of displayed colors. IBM decided to replace all of them with one universal D-SUB connector. It transmitted information about the depth of red, green and blue colors, bringing the number of displayed shades to 16.7 million. In addition, it has become easier for the software to work with one type of connector than to support several.

Another new IBM product is video cards with a built-in frame buffer (Video Graphics Array or VGA), which today is called video card memory. Then its volume in PS / 2 was 256 KB. This was enough for a resolution of 640x480 with 16 colors, or 320x200 and 256 colors. The new video cards worked with the MCA interface, so they were only available for PS / 2 computers. Nevertheless, the VGA standard has become widespread over time.

Instead of the large and not very reliable 5.25-inch floppy disks, IBM decided to use 3.5-inch drives. The company was the first to use them as the main standard. The main novelty of the new computers is the doubled capacity of floppy disks - up to 1.44 MB. And by the end of PS / 2 it had doubled to 2.88 MB. By the way, there was one rather serious error in PS / 2 drives. They could not tell the difference between a 720K floppy disk and a 1.44 MB floppy disk. Thus, it was possible to format the first as the second. In principle, it worked, but it threatened with the danger of data loss, and even after such an operation, only another PS / 2 computer could read information from the floppy disk.

And one more PS / 2 novelty - 72-pin SIMM modules instead of outdated SIPP. A few years later, they became the standard for all personal and not so computers, until they were replaced by DIMM strips.

So we come to the end of the 80s. IBM has done much more for the average consumer in these 10 years than in all the years prior to this. Thanks to her personal computers, we can now independently assemble a computer for ourselves, and not buy a finished one as Apple would like. Nothing prevents us from installing any operating system on it, except for Mac OS, which, again, is available only to owners of Apple computers. We got freedom, and IBM lost the market, but earned the fame of a pioneer.

By the early 90s, the blue giant was no longer the dominant player in the computer world. Intel then ruled the ball in the processor market, Microsoft dominated the application software segment, Novell succeeded in networking, Hewlett-Packard in printers. Even the hard drives invented by IBM began to be produced by other companies, as a result of which Seagate was able to come out on top (already in the late 80s and retains this primacy to this day).

In the corporate sector, not everything went well. Invented by IBM employee Edgar Codd in 1970, the concept of relational databases (in a nutshell, it is a way to display data in the form of two-dimensional tables) began to gain widespread popularity in the early 80s. IBM even helped create the SQL query language. And so the payment for labor - number one in the field of DBMS by the beginning of the 90s became Oracle.

Well, in the personal computer market, it was ousted by Compaq, and over time also by Dell. Eventually, IBM President John Akers began the process of reorganizing the company, dividing it into autonomous divisions, each of which focused on one specific area. Thus, he wanted to improve production efficiency and reduce costs. This is how IBM met the last decade of the 20th century.

Time of crisis

The nineties started off pretty well for IBM. Despite the decline in popularity of its personal computers, the company still made big profits. The largest in its history. It is a pity that it was only at the end of the 80s. Later, the blue giant simply failed to grasp the main trends in the computer world, which led to not very pleasant consequences.

Despite the success of personal computers in the penultimate decade of the last century, IBM continued to generate most of its revenue from mainframe sales. But the development of technology has made it possible to switch to the use of more compact personal computers, and with them to large computers based on microprocessors. In addition, the regular ones sold at lower margins than the mainframes.

Now it is enough to add up the decline in sales of the main profitable product, the loss of its position in the personal computer market, and at the same time the failures in the network technology market, successfully occupied by Novell, so as not to be surprised at the $ 1 billion losses in 1990 and 1991. And 1992 turned out to set a new record - $ 8.1 billion in losses. It was the largest corporate annual loss in US history.

Is it any wonder that the company has started to "move"? In 1993, Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. took over as President. His plan was to change the current situation, for which he radically restructured the company's policy, focusing the main divisions on services and software development. On the hardware side, IBM certainly had a lot to offer, but due to the multitude of computer manufacturers and the presence of other technology companies, it didn’t. Anyway, there will be someone who will offer a cheaper and no less functional product.

As a result, in the second half of the decade, IBM expanded its software portfolio with applications from Lotus, WebSphere, Tivoli and Rational. She also continued to develop her own relational database, DB2.

ThinkPad

Despite the crisis of the 90s, the blue giant presented one popular product. It was the ThinkPad line of laptops that still exist today, albeit under the patronage of Lenovo. It was introduced in the face of three models 700, 700C and 700T in October 1992. Mobile computers were equipped with a 10.4-inch screen, a 25 MHz Intel 80486SLC processor, a 120 MB hard drive, and a Windows 3.1 operating system. At the same time, their cost was $ 4350.

IBM ThinkPad 701 with Butterfly Keyboard

A little about the origin of the series name. The word "Think" was printed on the leather-bound IBM corporate notebooks. One of the participants in the new generation mobile PC project suggested adding a "Pad" (keyboard, keypad) to it. At first, the ThinkPad was not accepted by everyone, arguing that until now the name of all IBM systems was numerical. However, in the end, ThinkPad went as the official name of the series.

The first ThinkPad notebooks became very popular. Within a fairly short time, they have collected more than 300 awards from various publications for high quality workmanship and multiple design innovations. The latter, in particular, includes the "butterfly keyboard", which raised slightly and stretched in width to make it easier to work. Later, with the increase in the diagonal of the screen of mobile computers, the need for it disappeared.

For the first time, TrackPoint was used - a new kind of manipulator. It is still found in ThinkPad notebooks and many other enterprise-class mobile PCs today. In some models, an LED was installed on the screen to illuminate the keyboard in the dark. For the first time, IBM integrated an accelerometer into a laptop, which detected a fall, after which the hard drive heads parked, which significantly increased the likelihood of data safety in case of a strong impact. ThinkPad pioneered the use of fingerprint scanners and built-in TPM for data protection. Now all this is used to one degree or another by all laptop manufacturers. But do not forget that IBM should be grateful for all these "delights of life".

While Apple was paying big bucks for Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible to save the world with a new PowerBook, IBM was really pushing human progress towards a brighter future with its ThinkPads. For example, the ThinkPad 750 flew in 1993 on the Endeavor shuttle. Then the main task of the mission was to repair the Hubble telescope. The ThinkPad A31p has been on the ISS for a long time.

Today, the Chinese company Lenovo continues to support many of IBM's traditions. But this is already the story of the next decade.

Time of the new century

The company's change of course, which began in the mid-1990s, has reached its climax in the current decade. IBM continued to focus on providing consulting services, creating new technologies for licensing them, and developing software, while not forgetting about expensive equipment - the blue giant has not left this area so far.

The final stage of the reorganization took place between 2002 and 2004. In 2002, IBM acquired PricewaterhouseCoopers, a consulting firm, and sold its hard drive division to Hitachi. Thus, the blue giant abandoned the further production of hard drives, which he himself had invented half a century earlier.

IBM is not going to leave the business of supercomputers and mainframes yet. The company continues to fight for the first places in the Top500 ranking and continues to do so with a fairly high degree of success. In 2002, a special $ 10 billion program was even launched, according to which IBM created the necessary technologies to be able to provide access to supercomputers to any company almost immediately upon request.

While the blue giant's big computers are doing fine so far, small PCs have not been doing well. As a result, 2004 is marked as the year of the sale of the IBM computer business to the Chinese company Lenovo. The latter went all the developments on personal systems, including the popular ThinkPad series. Lenovo even won the right to use the IBM brand for five years. IBM itself received $ 650 million in cash and $ 600 million in shares in return. It now owns 19% of Lenovo. At the same time, the blue giant also continues to sell servers. Still not to continue being in the top three largest players in this market.

So what happened in the end? In 2005, about 195,000 employees worked for IBM, among whom 350 were recognized by the company as "outstanding engineers", and 60 people were named IBM Fellows. This title was introduced in 1962 by then President Thomas Watsan to highlight the best people in the company. Typically, an IBM Fellow received no more than 4-5 people a year. Since 1963, there have been about 200 such employees. 70 of them worked in May 2008.

With such a serious scientific potential, IBM has become one of the leaders in innovation. Between 1993 and 2005, the blue giant received 31,000 patents. Moreover, in 2003 he set a record for the number of patents received by one company in a year - 3415 pieces.

Ultimately today, IBM has become less accessible to the general consumer. In fact, it was the same before the 80s. For 20 years the company has been working with retail products, but still returned to its origins, albeit in a slightly different guise. But all the same, its technologies and developments reach us in the form of devices from other manufacturers. So the blue giant stays with us further.

Afterword time

At the end of this article, we would like to provide a short list of the most significant discoveries made by IBM during its existence, but not mentioned above. After all, it is always pleasant to be amazed once again that one or another well-known company is behind the creation of another favorite electronic toy.

The beginning of the era of high-level programming languages \u200b\u200bis attributed to IBM. Well, maybe not for her personally, but she took a very active part in this process. In 1954, the IBM 704 computer was introduced, one of the main "chips" of which was support for the Fortran language (short for Formula Translation). Its main purpose was to replace low-level assembly language with something more human readable.

In 1956, the first Fortran reference manual appeared. And in the future, his popularity continued to grow. Mainly due to the inclusion of a language translator in the standard software package for IBM computer systems. This language became the main language for scientific applications for many years, and also gave impetus to the development of other high-level programming languages.

We have already mentioned IBM's contribution to the development of databases. In fact, thanks to the blue giant, most sites on the Internet today that use relational DBMSs operate. They are not shy about using the SQL language, which also came from the bowels of IBM. It was introduced in 1974 by Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce. It was called then SEQUEL (Structured English Query Language), and then the abbreviation was shortened to SQL (Structured Query Language), since "SEQUEL" was a trademark of the British airline Hawker Siddeley.

Probably, some still remember how they ran games from cassette recorders on their home (or not home) EU computer. IBM was one of the first to use magnetic tape for data storage. In 1952, together with the IBM 701, she introduced the first magnetic tape drive that could write and read data.

Floppy disks. Left to right: 8 ", 5.25", 3.5 "

Floppy disks also came from IBM. In 1966, she introduced the first drive with a metal recording head. Five years later, she announced the beginning of the mass distribution of floppy disks and drives for them.

IBM 3340 "Winchester"

The slang word "hard drive" for hard drive also comes from the depths of IBM. In 1973, the company introduced the IBM 3340 "Winchester" hard drive. It got its name from the head of the development team Kenneth Haughton, who gave the IBM 3340 the internal name "30-30", derived from the Winchester 30-30 rifle. "30-30" directly indicated the capacity of the device - two plates of 30 MB each were installed in it. By the way, this particular model was the first to receive great commercial success in the market.

We should also thank IBM for our modern memory. It was she who in 1966 invented the technology for the production of dynamic memory, where only one transistor was allocated for one bit of data. As a result, it was possible to significantly increase the data recording density. Probably, this discovery prompted the company's engineers to create a special ultra-fast data buffer or cache. In 1968, this was first implemented in the System / 360 Model 85 mainframe and could store up to 16 thousand characters.

The architecture of the PowerPC processors also originated largely from IBM. Although it was jointly developed by Apple, IBM and Motorola, it was based on the IBM 801 processor, which the company planned to install in its first personal computers in the early 1980s. The architecture was initially supported by Sun and Microsoft. However, other developers were reluctant to write programs for it. As a result, Apple remained its only user for almost 15 years.

In 2006, Apple ditched the PowerPC in favor of the x86 architecture, specifically Intel processors. Motorola left the alliance in 2004. Well, IBM still did not curtail its development, but sent them in a slightly different direction. Several years ago, so much text was written about the Cell processor that it would be enough for several books. Today it is used in the Sony PlayStation 3, and Toshiba has also installed a simplified version of it in its flagship Qosmio Q50 multimedia laptop.

On this, perhaps, we will round off. If you wish, you can find many other amazing discoveries of IBM, and at the same time write a lot of words about its future projects, but then you should feel free to start making a separate book. After all, the company conducts research in various fields. She has hundreds of active projects, including such as nanotechnology and holographic data carriers, speech recognition, communicating with a computer using thoughts, new ways of controlling a computer, and so on - one listing will take several pages of text. So we put an end to this.

P.S. And at the very end, a little about the origin of the term "blue giant" (or "Big Blue"), as IBM is often called. As it turned out, the company itself has nothing to do with him. Products with the word "Blue" in their name appeared only in the 90s (in particular in a series of supercomputers), and the press has called it "blue giant" since the early 80s. IBM officials speculate that this may have come from the blue cover of its mainframes, which were produced in the 60s.

International Business Machines (www.ibm.com ) (NYSE: IBM) is a key figure in information technology. The American company IBM is the world's largest company that manufactures and supplies software and hardware, provides IT services and provides consulting services.

Company establishment

The company was officially founded on June 16, 1911, although the first developments began in the late 19th century. The original name of the company was Computing Tabulating Recording (CTR). The company was founded by Herman Hollerith, a talented statistician and engineer, who invented the first calculating and analytical machines. At that time, the company's products included various electrical equipment. In particular, CTR was engaged in the production of scales, cheese cutters, perforating machines, etc. Thomas Watson, who took over as CEO in 1914, played an important role in the history of the company. Then the CTR specialization became the production of tabulation machines.

IBM acquired its modern name in 1924, when the company significantly expanded its product range and entered the Canadian market.

Already in 1943, IBM released its first computer.

IBM is headquartered in New York State, Armonk.

Product line

The company is a major developer of operating and file systems, database management systems, office and middleware packages, VisualAge development environments and compilers.

An important area of \u200b\u200bIBM's work is the production of microprocessors of the POWER architecture, as well as workstations and servers, as well as Xeon-based ones. The company is engaged in the development of mainframes of the IBM System z series, supercomputers. The most famous of them are Deep Blue, Blue Gene, IBM Watson. Another popular product is a storage system called IBM System Storage.

Finance

In 1968, the company went public on the NYSE. At the moment, almost all one hundred percent of IBM shares are in free circulation. Last year, the company's revenue reached almost one hundred billion dollars, and net profit - 16 and a half billion. In 2014, the company's capitalization amounted to $ 161.69 billion. And last year, IBM shares reached a record value of $ 212.06 per share, which caused the company's capitalization to jump to $ 236.3 billion.

Among the largest shareholders of IBM are such prominent companies as Berkshire Hathaway Inc, Northern Trust Corp, State Street Corp, Vanguard Group Inc, Bank of New York Mellon, State Farm Mutual AU.

 

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