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I've always been interested in real-world problems.
When I ran into my first computer...
I thought, "Wow!"
I'd seen factories and things.
Those machines, they had no ability to change.
They had no ability, in short, to think.
And that was the missing element.
I had to write a couple of programs, and I could see the possibilities.
You could do anything with a computer.
I was convinced that computers would really change the world.
And if you have time for a story, I'll tell you why.
In the late 50s, all of IBM's existing product lines were running out of steam.
Principally because they didn't have enough memory.
Customers had discovered that they needed more memory than they had installed on their machines...
...and the machines couldn't address any more memory.
The basic concept was that we would replace all the existing product lines.
In January of 1961, we had a day-long winter carnival...
...in which corporate brass came and listened to our plan.
And almost everybody thought that was a good plan...
...except Senior Vice President Vin Learson.
And he went home that night, and brought in a new person called Bob Evans...
And told him...
..."If this plan is right, make it happen, and if it's wrong, change it."
And so we fought for six months.
The plan I was arguing for was something we could do now.
The plan he was arguing for was something that would involve waiting until first shipments in 1965.
We went with his plan, and it turned out to be a winner.
Bob called a meeting of all the engineering managers up at Saratoga Springs...
...to reorganize the lab—set up all-new projects, kill all the old projects.
To my utter amazement, he asked me if I would take the new product line under his reorganization.
I was stunned.
We had been scrapping back and forth, and here he is offering me the crown jewels.
I was amazed.
Bob was a very big man.
In spirit, in attitude...he is the greatest boss I ever had.
It was a challenge that nobody had undertaken before
to make a compatible computer family line,
and we didn't know whether we could do it.
There was a Fortune Magazine article in the Fall of '66...
...called "IBM's $5 Billion Gamble."
The computer business must have been 70-80% of the company at that point...
...and we were putting it all at risk.
It was hard making the technology work,
and the manufacturing was hard.
But you're proud to be working for leadership that's willing to step out and say:
"Yeah, we'll take this adventure on, and if we win, we win big,
"and if we lose, we lose big."
My purpose this morning it to discuss with you
the technical aspects of the announcement.
I think this might be useful because the magnitude of this...is somewhat bewildering.
We made a general purpose product line...
that used the same machine for all kinds of applications.
You could configure the system according to the application,
and yet the computer at the heart of it was still the same.
That simple principle is what the clients need all the time.
That's why it's so successful, and it has lasted so long.
I think in the last count, more than 60-70% of all the data in the world is residing on System 360s.
That's quite incredible.
Sixty years ago, an IBM salesman by the name of Blair Smith
was on an airplane with the president of American Airlines,
whose name was C. R. Smith.
And they said, "Hey we got the same last names..." and they got to talking.
IBM was using some technology in the defense area,
and could that technology be applied to solve this problem that the airlines had of making reliable reservations?
At the time it was a manual process.
They had a set of cards and a kind of a lazy susan,
and they would spin it around and pull it out
and mark your seat number on it and put it back on.
It was a complex problem that no one could solve.
IBM put together a research proposal
to work with American Airlines to try to apply their technology,
and ultimately they created SABRE.
The SABRE System provides for prompt, accurate service to the customer
by making the sales agent self-sufficient,
independent of any other agent in obtaining all the information she needs to satisfy the customer's desires in the coming jet-age.
The airline business was growing rapidly.
Extreme design measures had to be taken.
We had to have capacity and performance.
We had to be very responsive to all the reservations that were coming in,
and turn around the transactions in a matter of seconds.
The airline could not make a reservation if that computer went down.
And if it had to crash, it could immediately come back to life
—very quickly, in a matter of seconds.
To demonstrate this, I would bring in some people, and I'd go up to the console,
and I would say, "Now I'm gonna make the system crash.
"I'm gonna write zeroes down in the low area of main memory."
And I'd sit there, and I'd go all right, and I'd put in zeroes.
And I couldn't get it to crash.
This is humorous to them...
because the competitor had a system
which would crash when they didn't want it to crash.
I couldn't make ours crash.
The airline industry that we know today...
could not function without a system of this nature.
When you type in, "I wanna fly from A to B,"
and it asks you your name...
that software was originally written by me in 1965.
Amtrak uses it today.
Chicago Board of Options Exchange.
The 911 system in New York.
You can't beat this old dog that was designed 50 years ago
even with all the modern tools that we have today.
When it was launched, the thought was that it would be able to handle 84,000 phone calls a day.
It has since been taken out to tens of thousands of travel agents.
It's the front-end for Expedia, Travelocity and others,
and does probably about 30,000 transactions a second.
The problem that they identified then, that they solved in the subsequent years,
was so resilient and creative
that 60 years later we can't do any better.
Policy Letter Number 4 is really kind of a way of describing
what was going on within the IBM culture.
It's a letter written by T. J. Watson Jr. back in 1953.
He was negotiating to build plants in Southern states.
The governors in those Southern states were really pressing him
to sign up for separate-but-equal policy, and he was clear:
We are not going to discriminate against our employees.
So he wrote this letter...
as a way to send a message to the governors.
Now you have to decide whether you want the jobs.
He was clear that IBM would not discriminate on the basis of race, or color, or creed.
And then he caused it to be printed in the local newspapers
as a way to send a message to the governors that this wasn't just an affectation.
This was belief.
It shows the commitment of the company to put a stake in the ground
even when it potentially is going to cost the company something.
IBM set an example that others could observe.
But this isn't an isolated instance.
In 1914 we employed the first disabled employees.
In 1934 we employed women...
...in what were the high-tech jobs at the time.
And the following year, the founder of the company
declared that it was the policy of the IBM company
to pay women the same thing that men earned for doing the same work.
This is like 30 years before any Civil Rights statute in the United States obligated us to do it.
In 1984 you see IBM declaring...
that it will not discriminate against people on the basis of *** orientation.
2005... we set a policy that said we weren't going to discriminate
against people on the basis of information that we could glean from their genetic makeup.
First company in the world to do it.
At some level we are all different.
We think differently.
We react to the world around us differently.
Those differences aren't things to be afraid of.
They are in fact the things that drive innovation and creativity,
and the ability to adapt to the world.
We believe that companies are great because they can attract the greatest and smartest people.
And the belief that talented, bright people
are found in every part of the human family is not just a kind of... poster statement.
This is who we are.
In the late 60s, the grocery industry decided to begin to think about putting scanners in grocery stores.
The task was fairly daunting.
First it was to pick a symbology.
Some of the symbologies were round circles.
Some of the symbologies were half of a round circle.
And one of the symbologies was a linear barcode,
submitted by IBM.
All interested parties who would propose the symbol
were invited to come and make a presentation to the committee in private...
for about 20 minutes.
Toward the end of these, it was IBM's turn.
The door opened, and, if I recall right, three people came in.
One was a very unique IBM individual.
He didn't look to me... like the kind of IBM people that I had been associated with.
If I recall right... his suit may have been brown.
But he did one of the most incredible jobs you will have ever seen.
He had his mind around the economics.
He had his mind around the symbology.
And then he did something very unique.
He said, "Now you probably have a question... "about how we're going to do this."
And he reached in his pocket, and he pulled out a disc.
It was one of the early silicon wafers.
And he said, "This is the basis... "of our new computing power.
What we're going to do, is put a computer into every checkstand."
And as IBM walked out and the door closed,
the chairman of the symbol selection subcommittee said,
"My God they've got it!"
We announced the IBM supermarket system on October 11, 1973.
We had this great trick.
There were no source-marked products.
There was nothing where the grocery manufacturer put a symbol on that we had.
But we had a Camay bar with an adhesed label we could put on this thing.
And we would stand at the far end of the checkstand,
from where the checker is and we could throw that Camay bar,
and when it would cross the little scanning window,
the register would go ka-chunk.
And the audience would go, "My God!"
And now barcodes are everywhere.
We had no idea how far this was going.
We changed the way the world shopped.
I believe that this nation should commit itself
to achieving the goal, before this decade is out,
of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.
When Kennedy announced that we're gonna go to the moon...
and return a man from the moon safely by the end of the decade,
that was a thrilling proposition to me.
When I came out of college, I had three goals.
I wanted to do something challenging.
I wanted to do something for my country.
And I wanted to do it in Texas.
I joined IBM in June of '68, seven days after I graduated from college.
I don't think we'd have got to the moon without what IBM did.
And I don't think people know that.
NASA never built a rocket.
NASA never built a spacecraft.
NASA never built a computer.
They funded it. They managed it.
But industry built it.
I think industry deserves every bit as much credit as anyone does.
And IBM deserves every bit as much credit as any in industry for the space program.
That's one small step for man,
one giant leap for mankind.
I've probably even talked more about Apollo 13 over the years than I have Apollo 11.
Our responsibility was to make sure that the spacecraft was performing as we had hoped it would,
and that if it wasn't, then we had lots of work to do.
But if you were real good, you could anticipate
what you were gonna be asked to do before you were even asked to do it.
Nothing showed that more than Apollo 13.
As the Apollo 13 was some 205,000 miles from Earth,
speeding toward its rendezvous with the moon, the fuel cells that supply it with electrical power suddenly failed.
One of the things we did was a maneuver to get them back a day early.
Actually, to get them back alive.
A maneuver which, prior to that mission, could not have been computed by the ground system.
We put that capability in to the computer for the first time for Apollo 13.
And I know that because...
it was my office-mate and I that did that.
My office-mate was the return-to-Earth expert.
I was the maneuver-planning expert.
Notice I became an expert in 19 months, but...
nevertheless, that's the way things work sometimes.
People have asked me:
"Weren't you scared of the fact that they could die?"
I never thought a whole lot about whether they'd make it back again or not.
It was just that we were going to do everything we could to get them back.
We all were in it together.
And we got to see whether a bunch of stuff that we did,
that we hoped we'd never use,
actually worked when we had to use it.
And it did.
And a lot of that was done by IBMers.
That's my Apollo 13 story, in short.
We were selected to go work on a top secret project.
Our mission was to get a product into the market in a year,
using off-the-shelf components.
It became known as the acorn project because we knew that the mighty oak would grow.
There was about 10, 13 of us.
We said, "We can build this, it's not a big deal."
Twelve of us that designed it, yeah. Twelve engineers.
The dirty dozen.
We would celebrate together, and eat together...
I don't think any of us slept together.
But we would do just about everything else together.
We would be at work late.
We trusted each other.
It was a tight-knit family.
We were all young... and energetic...
didn't know what we couldn't do.
They asked me to do some work on the color graphics card and video for the PC.
I said, "Sure, why not?" You know. It sounded like fun.
I'm the mother of the motherboard.
It's kind of the thing that holds the whole computer together and conducts the orchestra of the computer.
And I designed it. Pretty good for a girl, huh?
We started in August, and we shipped the first prototype to Microsoft by Thanksgiving.
That was unheard of.
We built something, you know, that everybody wanted, and everybody could use, and everybody could afford.
But we actually wanted to build something that we could use, that we would have,
that the designers could actually do something with.
I always wanted to build a faster Pac-Man game,
so that was part of the test-case: Would it run Pac-Man?
Anybody came in the office and saw us playing games, we said, "We're testing! We're testing the machine!" You know.
Today, I'm pleased to tell you that we're introducing the IBM Personal Computer.
Today's announcement will take its place among such historic events as the introduction of the punch-card,
direct-access storage devices, and network technology.
We didn't just design a computer. We created an industry.
The name "IBM Personal Computer"... We all said, "Ugh! That's so boring!"
We wanted something really vibrant and special.
It was evidently a pretty smart name.
We sold a quarter of a million by the end of the year.
We did nothing but chase demand for, literally, for years in the PC business.
It was wonderful.
It was a long run. We had a very long, successful run in the business.
Made the world smaller.
If you go back 10 years ago, technology to decode the human genome had just occurred.
There was a rush of ideas in this field.
What would you do with such information?
Spencer Wells at National Geographic came to us and proposed the idea... that what if we could go look at human population all around the planet,
and look for what is it that makes us similar?
And how far back in time and ancestry do you have to go to reconstruct the entire human family tree?
We basically use DNA as a tool to study ancient human migrations.
How recently did we leave Africa?
What were the routes that we took as we moved into Asia?
How many people could have made it across the Bering land bridge into the Americas?
These big, kind of anthropological questions...
This whole notion that if you look beneath the surface, we're virtually identical.
99.9% identical, in fact.
These genetic patterns that are retained in the DNA of indigenous groups around the world are kind of disappearing.
They're being thrown into a big melting pot.
A good thing socially perhaps, but it makes our work really tough.
The push is to get out there and get the samples on the ground.
And that's really the impetus behind the Genographic project.
With just a small set of samples, You know a couple thousand, which is what we had before we started the project...
you can say a little bit about very broad patterns of how we populated the world.
But, you know, it's so much better if you could get hundreds of thousands of people around the world participating.
It was obvious that this was going to be a very data-intensive and analytically-intensive project.
And we approached IBM as a partner.
We are teaching ourselves in IBM now how to actually deal with genetic data.
I do imagine a future which is very much personalized in health care,
not just how you cure a disease, but also in how you live your own life.
It's not going to be a one size fits all world in the future.
I see a way in which, the more we know about the individuals, the more tailored and customized life will be for them.
I can imagine such a world, but I don't think we are there yet.
I want to make such a world.
There was a mistaken view that if you just put a lab somewhere, hired a lot of good people...
somehow, something magical would come out of it for the company.
And I didn't believe it.
That didn't work.
Just doing science in isolation will not, in the end, work.
One of the first things I did when I became the director of research was, I gathered up the people who reported directly to me.
We went on a tour of the development labs
We went on a tour of the development labs to try and find out hey, what is it that we with our special skills, what can we do to contribute?
It wasn't a good idea just to work on radical things.
You can't win on breakthroughs; they're too rare.
And I am saying this as if it just took me years to develop this simple thought:
we're always gonna work on the in-place technology and make it better and on the breakthrough technology.
It was just a dream assignment.
They said, "If you could start the computer over from scratch, "just do it the right way, start from scratch, "what would you do?"
And we came up with RISC: Reduced Instruction Set Computers.
It was the most fun that any of us had ever had.
You know, we invented relational databases.
Benoît came up with fractals.
We even invented that little thing on the PC, you know...
where you don't need a mouse, just that little button you push.
Anyway, they made millions on them.
To create the systems that haven't existed before.
But you have to make sure you are also hiring and building the team
with people that are hand-selected, that, to them, building something that hasn't existed before, is the fun part.
So you get up in the morning and say, "Oh, this hasn't been done before. Great!" As opposed to: "Oh my God, "it hasn't been done, how am I gonna do it?"
So it's a very different mentality.
I discovered this immense, amazing world, which was there, absolutely waiting.
The word came very quickly. It was "fractal."
It's almost as simple as the formula of a circle.
Why shouldn't the result be as simple as a circle?
A formula can be very simple and create a universe of bottomless complexity.
Like, I don't know... ...a curtain opening.
All of those things were very... really good stuff, yeah.
You look at the innovations and progress that have occurred in the industry over the last 100 years that IBM has existed,
so many innovative things came out of this company, and they have shaped the entire industry.
On many occasions I wonder: You know, how come we are having so much fun?
When will it end? But it doesn't seem to end.
IBM is really about the people.
It's not just the level of intelligence, and it is that...
...but it's the dedication to do whatever it takes to get things done.
Tom Watson Sr. used to go into the lab at Endicott when that was the only lab they had,
and he would corner some young engineer, and he'd say: "What do we sell?"
The young man would say, "Punch-card machines, sir."
"No! No! We sell a service that satisfies.
By being able to integrate across these technical disciplines, you are delivering what the clients need.
That's the reason that IBM will be there and prosper and helping people for another 100 years.
What's most amazing to me is how the company keeps innovating itself.
You gotta stay alert. And you've got to be nimble on your feet
And you've got to recognize that what was true yesterday will not be true tomorrow in terms of technology and what you can do with it for people.
I work with people who have been there for 26, 27 plus years.
You work for IBM for that long because you don't realize it's been that long because you get a chance to do new things all the time.
I joined IBM in 1984, and since then it's been one interesting I guess you can call it adventure after another.
People told me, "We don't understand what you're doing, "but since you keep getting all these invitations from universities to come and lecture on it,
you know, "and articles in Scientific American... please, go ahead."
It did all the things I wanted to do and more.
And you didn't work for IBM, you were part of IBM.
In that sense, I'm an IBMer and will be all my life.
I'm an IBMer.