Research history highlights

1945 - IBM'S FIRST RESEARCH LAB. IBM's first research facility, the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory, opens in a renovated fraternity house near Columbia University in Manhattan. In 1961, IBM moves its research headquarters to the T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. Today, IBM Research operates Laboratories in the United States, Switzerland, Israel, Japan, China and India.

1952 - FIRST CALIFORNIA RESEARCH LAB. IBM opens its first West Coast lab in San Jose, California - the area that decades later will come to be known as "Silicon Valley." Within four years, the lab begins to make its mark by inventing magnetic storage systems.

1956 - FIRST MAGNETIC HARD DISK. IBM introduces the world's first magnetic hard disk for data storage. RAMAC (or Random Access Method of Accounting and Control) offers unprecedented performance by permitting random access to any of the million characters distributed over both sides of 50 two-foot-diameter disks. Produced in San Jose, California, IBM's first hard disk stored about 2,000 bits of data per square inch and had a purchase price of about $10,000 per megabyte. By 1997, the cost of storing a megabyte had dropped to around ten cents.

1956 - ZURICH LAB. IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory opens. In 1986 and 1987, researchers in this laboratory will earn back-to-back Nobel Prizes for physics - first for the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope, then for the breakthrough discovery of high-temperature superconductivity.

1957 - FORTRAN. IBM revolutionizes programming with the introduction of FORTRAN (Formula Translator). Created by John Backus, it soon becomes the most widely used computer programming language for technical work. For the first time, engineers and scientists can write computer programs in more natural forms, such as C=A/B rather than as strings of "machine language: 1s and 0s.

1958 - SAGE. The SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) computer is declared fully operational. Built under contract to MIT's Lincoln Laboratories for the North American Air Defense System, Sage was the first system to operate in real time.

1961 - T.J. WATSON RESEARCH CENTER. IBM moves its research headquarters from Manhattan to Westchester County, New York. The Thomas J. Watson Research Center, which now has laboratories in the Yorktown Heights and nearby Hawthorne is IBM's largest research facility. Research here centers on semiconductors, computer science, physical science and mathematics.

1962 - SABRE. Two IBM 7090 mainframes form the backbone of the SABRE reservation system for American Airlines. As the first airline reservation system to work live over phones lines, SABRE links high speed computers and data communications to handle seat inventory and passenger records from terminals in more than 50 cities.

1964 - SYSTEM/360. The world of computing is forever changed when IBM debuts the first compatible family of computers in which software and peripherals work seamlessly. When introduced, the System/360 offers customers five processors and a variety of configurations for power, speed and memory.

1966 - ONE- TRANSISTOR MEMORY CELL. IBM scientist Bob Dennard invents one-transistor dynamic RAM (now known as DRAM) which permits major increases in memory density. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan presents Dennard with the National Medal of Technology. DRAM chips based on Dennard's invention still reign as a dominant form of computer memory.

1967 - FRACTALS. A scientist at IBM Research, Benoit B. Mandelbrot, published a paper in Science introducing fractal geometry - the concept that seemingly irregular natural shapes, such as the branching of trees, have the same form when viewed from close up or from far away. "The Mandelbrot Set," a fractal object discovered in 1980, has been described as the most complex - and possibility most beautiful - object ever seen in mathematics. In the 30 years since they were first identified, the study of fractals has brought new insight to a wide variety of fields, including mathematics, physics, earth sciences, economics and the arts.

1970 - RELATIONAL DATABASES. IBM scientist Ted Codd published a paper introducing the concept of relational databases. It calls for information stored within a computer to be arranged in easy-to-interpret tables so that nontechnical users can access and manage large amounts of data. Today as we approach the new millennium, nearly all database structures are based on the IBM concept of relational databases.

1971 - SPEECH RECOGNITION. IBM achieves its first operational application of speech recognition, which enables engineers servicing equipment to talk to, and receive spoken answers from a computer that can recognize about 5,000 words. Today, IBM's ViaVoice voice recognition technology has a vocabulary of 64,000 words and 260,000-word back-up dictionary. In 1997 ViaVoice products are introduced in China and Japan. Highly customized VoiceType products are also available specifically for people working in the fields of emergency medicine, journalism, law and radiology.

1972 - HAIFA RESEARCH LABORATORY. IBM established a science center in Haifa, Israel. Today, nearly 250 scientists and engineers at the Haifa Research Laboratory focus on a wide range of research areas, including operating system, distributed computing, systems availability, computer communication, computing languages, multimedia, physical and logic design, and mathematical models and applications.

1979 - THIN FILM RECORDING HEADS. Instead of using hand-wound wire structures as coils for inductive elements, IBM researchers substitute thin film "wires" patterned by optical lithography. This leads to higherperformance recording heads at reduced cost, and establishes IBM's leadership in "areal density" - storing the most data in the least space. The result is higher-capacity and higher-performance disk drives.

1980 - RISC ARCHITECTURE. IBM successfully builds the first prototype computer employing RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) architecture. Based on an invention by IBM scientist John Cocke in the early 1970's, the RISC concept simplified the instructions given to run computers, making them faster and more powerful. Today, RISC architecture is the basis of most workstations and is widely viewed as the dominant computing architecture of the future.

1981 - SCANNING TUNNELING MICROSCOPE. Two scientists from the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, Gerd K. Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer, invent the Scanning Tunneling Microscope, which provides a first-ever look at the topography of surfaces in an atom-by-atom format. In 1986, Binnig and Rohrer are awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for their accomplishment.

1982 - TOKYO RESEARCH LABORATORY. The Tokyo Research Laboratory opens its doors. Today more than 250 people at IBM's Tokyo Lab are working on research in the fields of computer science, storage and semiconductor technology, and manufacturing.

1982 - TRELLIS-CODED MODULATION. Soon after its invention at the Zurich Research Laboratory, trellis-coded modulation (TCM) is first used in voiceband modems to send data at higher rates over telephone channels. Today, TCM is applied in a large variety of terrestrial and satellite-based transmission systems as a key technique for achieving faster and/or more reliable digital transmission.

1985 - TOKEN RING NETWORK. Token Ring technology, developed by the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, brings a new level of control to local area networks and quickly becomes an industry standard for LAN's helping to connect local printers, workstations and servers.

1986 - ALMADEN RESEARCH CENTER. IBM Research dedicates the Almaden Research Center - the successor to the San Jose Research Laboratory which was established in 1952. Today, Almaden is IBM's second-largest laboratory. Its primary focus areas include storage systems, technology, and computer science.

1986 - HIGH TEMPERATURE SUPERCONDUCTIVITY. Two scientists from the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, J. Georg Bednorz and K. Alex Muller, discover superconductivity in ceramic oxides that carry electricity without loss of energy at much higher temperatures than any other superconductor. The discovery sparks a worldwide effort focusing on applications of high-temperature superconductors to such areas as power generation, microwave applications and sensors. One year later, Bednorz and Muller are awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for their discovery.

1988 - NSFNET. IBM, working with the National Science Foundation and our partners at MCI and Merit, designed, developed and deployed a new high-speed network, the NSFNET, to connect approximately 200 US universities and 6 US-based supercomputer centers. The NSFNET quickly became the principal backbone of the Internet and the spark that ignited the worldwide Internet revolution. The NSFNET greatly increased the speed and capacity of the Internet (increasing the bandwidth on backbone links from 56kb/sec to 1.5Mb/sec to 45 Mb/sec) and greatly increased the reliability and reach of the Internet reaching more than 50 million users in 93 countries when control of the Internet was transferred to the telecom carriers and commercial Internet Service Providers in April 1995.

1989 - SILICON GERMANIUM TRANSISTORS. By replacing more expensive and exotic materials like gallium arsenide with silicon germanium (known as SiGe), IBM creates faster chips at lower costs. Introducing germanium into the baselayer of an otherwise all-silicon bipolar transistor allows for significant improvements in operating frequency, current, noise and power capabilities. In 1995, IBM commercializes its silicon germanium chips through partnerships with companies in the emerging telecommunications market. Hughes and Nortel are among the first to participate.

1992 - THINKPAD. IBM introduces a new line of notebook computers. Housed in a distinctive black case and featuring the TrackPoint (an innovative pointing device nestled in the middle of the keyboard), the ThinkPad is an immediate hit and goes on to collect more than 300 awards for design and quality.

1993 - SCALABLE PARALLEL SYSTEMS. IBM pioneers the technology of joining multiple computer processors and breaking down complex, data-intensive jobs to speed their completion. Deep Blue - the chessplaying computer that in 1997 defeats World Class Champion Garry Kasparov - used this technology. It is also used in weather prediction, oil exploration and manufacturing.

1994 - PRIZMA SWITCH. IBM ships its first ATM switch for corporate customers. Base on the PRIZMA switching technology developed by IBM Research, the outstanding scalability of PRIZMA enables IBM to ship products that support dramatically increased throughputs.

1995 - CHINA RESEARCH LAB. IBM Research established the China Research Laboratory in Beijing. The lab is formed to focus initially on creating software and applications that are especially relevant to China. Examples include digital libraries, speech recognition for Mandarin, machine translation, Chinese language processing, multimedia and the Internet.

1996 - AUSTIN RESEARCH LAB OPENS. Based in Austin, Texas, the lab is focused on advanced circuit design, as well as new design techniques and tools for very high performance microprocessors.

1997 - DEEP BLUE. The 32-node IBM RS/6000 SP supercomputer, Deep Blue, defeated World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov in the first known instance of a computer vanquishing a world champion chess player in tournament-style competition. Also after years of teamwork among Research and Microelectronics divisions, IBM introduced the CMOS 7S process, which allowed manufacturers to use copper wires to link transistors in computer chips instead of relying on traditional aluminum interconnects; a revolutionary advance in semiconductor technology.

1998 - CMOS. A 15-person design team at the IBM Austin Research Laboratory announced the first ever CMOS microprocessor that ran at 1 billion cycles per second. IBM scientists developed new silicon-on-insulator technology to be used in the construction of a mainstream processor, and signaled that the advance would soon reach the market in new circuit designs and product groups.

1998 - INDIA RESEARCH LABORARORY OPENS. Just a few short years later, nearly seventy researchers are working in a variety of research areas, including e-commerce, media mining, fingerprint matching, speech recognition, weather forecasting and wireless networks.

1890 - The U.S. Census Bureau adopts the Hollerith Punch Card, Tabulating Machine and Sorter to compile results of the 1890 census, reducing an almost 10-year process to 2 ½ years, saving the government a whopping $5 million. Inventor Herman Hollerith, a Census Bureau statistician, forms the Tabulating Machine Company in 1896.

1911 - The Tabulating Machine Company merges with the International Time Recording Co. And Computing Scale Co. Of America to become the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co. Based in New York City, the company employs 1,300.

1924 - C-T-R changes it's name to International Business Machines Corp. In a letter to employees, company president T.J. Watson writes: "Our new name is particularly adaptable and suitable to our business, in view of our increasing growth, the constant development of additions to our line, and our products covering such a wide range in the field of business machinery."

1944 - MARK I COMPUTER. IBM introduces the world's first large-scale calculating computer. Designed in collaboration with Harvard University, the Mark I (or Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator) uses electromechanical relays to solve addition problems in less than a second, multiplication in six seconds, and division in 12 seconds.