Gene Amdahl IBM Fellow Emeritus Father of Mainframes 1922–2015
Today we celebrate the life and legacy of our colleague and true pioneer, Gene Amdahl. As the Father of the System/360 Mainframe, his work changed the way the world works—from how we shop and travel to exploring the moon. He even formulated the law for parallel computing, upholding his reach on technology from the dawn of the computing age to the cognitive era and beyond.
💻 IBM Japan in 15 Seconds 📚 Here’s your crash course on IBM Japan. In 1925, a tableware manufacturer installed the first IBM tabulating machine. In 1973, Leo Esaki won the Nobel Prize in Physics for electron tunneling. In 1982, the Tokyo Research Lab opened. In 1992, the ThinkPad700C was released. And now, in 2015, IBM’s teaming up with Apple in Japan to create an elderly-friendly iPad. We’re out of time, but rest assured, the goods are still being churned out. Class dismissed.
“I believe we are migrating toward a networked environment in which thinking is no longer an individual activity, nor bound by time and space.”
Douglas Rushkoff Media Theorist Author, Present Shock No. 1 of 30 | View the poster
Model, author, poet, mother, artist. Pati Hill had several careers. But she's best known for the work she made in the late 1970s with a new art-making tool, the photocopier. Smitten by the qualities of the IBM Copier 2, Hill negotiated the loan of a machine through friend and IBM collaborator, designer Charles Eames. IBM delivered and installed the copier at her home, inspiring a body of work that spans years. While not the first to use a photocopier in an art context, Hill was no copycat, and proved herself in hundreds of images and words to be an innovative, eloquent, and singular artist. Pati Hill died last month . We remember her here with some of her black-and-white best, including A Swan: An Opera in Nine Chapters, Photocopied Objects (balls and jacks) and Photocopied Objects (soap), courtesy of Estate of Pati Hill.
Get a sneak peek at Arcadia University's upcoming retrospective of her work →
Ooo La La IBM, circa 1957
More than a half century after introducing the IBM 704 to France, this vintage ad has a certain design joie de vivre.
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World’s Fair 50: The Automatic Language Translator
Another World’s Fair crowd pleaser was the IBM Automatic Language Translator. In a live demonstration, the computer translated Russian text into English in a matter of seconds.
The most amazing part was that the translation wasn’t created from a computerized ‘dictionary search’ but from the analysis of both languages’ complex nuances and shades of meaning, syntax and grammar. To think that 50 years later, we have smart phones with translation apps for just about every language spoken. Очень здорово. Translation: Very cool.
World's Fair 50: Popcorn, 50 feet up
The showpiece of the IBM Pavilion was the massive Ovoid Theatre. Once seated in the “People Wall”, the audience was lifted 50 feet into the belly of the theater by a massive hydraulic lift for a screening of the film “Information Machine” on multiple large screens. One of the film’s topics? “The similarity of methods that are used by the human mind and computers to solve problems.” Meanwhile, Mary Poppins was a box-office hit, women were wearing pant suits and the cost of a First Class postage stamp was 5¢.
World's Fair 50: Bird? Plane? It’s the Ovoid Theatre host
One of the most popular attractions at the World’s Fair was IBM’s multimedia experience, the Information Machine, held inside the Ovoid Theatre. Orchestrating the show was a host who’d drop down from overhead on a tiny platform, welcome guests and disappear again up into the theater. Once guests were inside, he’d reappear on a balcony and narrate the show from beginning to the end.
World's Fair 50: Roberta Peters hits a high note
Metropolitan Opera star Roberta Peters performs at the IBM Pavilion with an aria from La Traviata. The sign in the background reads “50 Years of Progress,” which from where we sit now, 50 years on, means IBM can actually lay claim to over 100 years of progress. History really does repeat itself.
