IBM Computing Legacy, The Complete Story From 1890 To Quantum Computing

The IBM computing legacy is usually told as a story about machines, and it is really a story about a company repeatedly destroying its own best business before somebody else did. IBM sold punch card tabulators when tabulators were the industry, then bet itself on mainframes, then built the personal computer that took the mainframe’s place at the centre of the story. The same pattern runs through its quantum programme. IBM put a five-qubit processor on the public internet in 2016, years before there was a market for one, and it funds that work today from the enterprise business those machines are eventually meant to succeed. What follows traces the IBM computing legacy from the 1890 United States census to the processors now installed in Kobe and San Sebastian. The story begins before there was a computer to speak of, with a machine built to hit a deadline. The 1880 United States census had taken more than eight years to complete and the population was still climbing, so the Census Office ran a competition for something faster. Herman Hollerith, who had worked there, won it with a system that recorded each person as holes punched into a card and counted…