The IBM Century: Creating the IT Revolution

Excellent book that describes to corporate view of the history of IBM.

Readers interested in IBM should buy this book and enjoy the excellent essays.Despite the excellent essays the book title "The IBM Century" is not justified.Some reasons:There are no figures about the development of the global IT market.The IBM World Trade Corporation, founded by Watson Sr. in 1949, with Arthur K. Watson as CEO until was surpassing IBM Domestic in 1963, does not exist in this book.The editor argues that "accounts and memoirs of IBM's major developments of the past three decades are also absent and these memoirs have yet to be written".How should a customer ordering a book with this title know in advance that the CEO terms after Watson Sr., Watson Jr. and Learson are in fact excluded?As an excellent source I recommend Frank G. Soltis: "Fortress Rochester".John Cocke "father of RISC processors" is not covered in this "IBM Century".Yost: "In 1911 Hollerith sold the Tabulating Machine Company to businessman Charles Flint. Flint combined this company with two other firms he had recently acquired, the Computing Scale Company and the International Time Recording Company, to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Corporation (C-T-R)."There is no such statement in the autobiography of Charles R. Flint "Memories of an Active Life" (1923), who describes himself as "The Father of Trusts", bestowed on him by the Chicago newspapers ... continuing "...in the light of thirty years' experience, during which time I have acted as organizer or industrial expert in the formation of twenty-four consolidations, let me review the general advantage of this form of industrial economy....In 1911 I made a departure from the practice of bringing about consolidations of allied interests, that is by consolidating the manufacturers of similar but not identical products. The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co. is of this class; and although it is not the largest of the consolidations in which I have acted as organizer, it has been and is the most successful. At the outset of this organization, I pointed out to the Guarantee Trust Co. that proposed `allied consolidation', instead of being dependent for earnings upon a single industry, would own three separate and distinct lines of business...On the several but not joint responsibility of my syndicate subscribers, the Guaranty Trust loaned over $4.000.000....The Company started with an aggregate bonded indebtedness of $6.500.000 three times its then net current assets."G. D. Austrian, in Herman Hollerith (1982), quotes Roebling writing to Hollerith: "Mr. Flint is a gentleman I have known for good many years, and his business is putting together industrial consolidations."IBM describes Charles R. Flint as follows:"Charles R. Flint was the founder of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, the forerunner of IBM. A businessman and financier, Flint brought together in 1907 the principals of three companies -- the International Time Recording Company of Endicott, N.Y.; the Computing Scale Company of America, of Dayton, Ohio; and the Tabulating Machine Company of Washington, D.C. -- to propose a merger. Talks and detailed planning among the parties continued until June 6, 1911, when the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (C-T-R) was incorporated as a holding company controlling the three separate firms. Flint remained a member of C-T-R's board of directors until his retirement in 1930."In a nutshell: Hollerith did not sell to Flint, it was a complicated financially engineered consolidation of companies with shareholders, of which Flint was not the owner but the orchestrator.Yost: "The formation of C-T-R justifiably is the recognized starting point of IBM. ... The corporation itself recognizes 1911 as IBM's start, and the vast majority of computer historians do as well."In 1995 Emerson Pugh explained in Chapter 2 - Origins of IBM - on Page 28:"It is traditional in IBM to honor Watson by equating the founding of the company with his arrival as general manager of CTR." Under Note 23 on page 336 you find: "The view that IBM was founded when T.J. Watson, Sr., became general manager of CTR in 1914 is broadly accepted. For example, the anticipated announcement of the appointment of Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., as chief executive of IBM was reported by the New York Times on 26 March 1993, p.1D as follows: "Mr. Gerstner, 51, who is chairman of the RJR Nabisco Holdings Corporation, would be the sixth chief executive in the 79-year history of the International Business Machines Corporation, and the first picked from outside the company's ranks."In fact, I remember that IBM under John F. Akers celebrated its 75th anniversary in 1989!Pugh continues on Page 28: "From a historical perspective, however, the founding of IBM might better be dated to the founding of Hollerith's business. Although other candidates for the `founding event' exist, winning the contract in late 1889 to process data from the upcoming census literally put Hollerith in business."The year of 2014 is the next big opportunity to celebrate IBM's rich history: 100th anniversary of Thomas Watson, Sr., joining CTR and 100th birthday of Thomas Watson, Jr., Jan. 14th, 1914! This is my favorite year of the birth of IBM, because it was Watson Sr. who had the IBM vision and was the longest of the long-term thinkers as Tedlow ("The Watson Dynasty")"formulates correctly in chapter 10 headlined "The Watson Way".Yost (see "quotes" and comments):"Watson Sr., was reluctant to enter the computer business."This is in contradiction to Emerson Pugh's reference to John McPherson (Building IBM - Pg.357)."Thomas Watson Jr. was more open to the possibility of computers ... but showed some initial reluctance".This is a misrepresentation of Watson Jr. who, after returning from WW II, was concentrating all his efforts on leading IBM into the computer business."IBM 701 ... Hurd was the principal technical leader".Bob Evans on page 174 writes correctly that "Jerrier A. Haddad and Nathaniel Rochester, leading young development managers, assumed overall direction of the project." This is also my understanding."Despite the immense impact of CICS and IMS ... they have received relatively little attention in the existing historical literature."IT Historian Martin Campbell-Kelly in "A History of the Software Industry" Pg. 266: "But if CICS were to vanish, corporate America would grind to a halt. If Microsoft Windows were to vanish, one of the available substitutes would fill the vacuum within weeks, perhaps within days."On the back cover the editor claims that this book contains "the most comprehensive IBM annotated bibliography".In addition to the important books in Yost's bibliography I have carefully researched and studied more than 40 books about IBM which are not mentioned in Yost's annotated bibliography and should be added; the same applies to another set of almost 30 books with relevance to IBM's history.