From the start with IBM
...he beginning of WW11 the US government incorporated all of the IBM-facilities in the production of war equipment and machinery. IBM made a 1% profit, which it put to good use by offering it to widows and orphans of WW11. It was the first of many charitable offers they would make. In 1944 was there first breakthrough. IBM and Howard Aiken, a professor at Harvard University, invented the Mark 1. It took six years, but the automatic sequence controlled calculator was the first step to making computers. In 1952 IBM made history again when it created its first commercial computer. The 701 was a vacuum tube-type, but was improved by transistors in 1959. A major innovation was the use of magnetized plastic tape, read by a tape drive, it was the first use of modern tape in the computer history. In 1956 Tom Watson jr. took over his dads leading role in IBM. He was a US Army air corps-pilot in WW11. He continued his fathers job very well, because it led the industry for the next twenty years. In 1957 IBM showed a newer computer at the World Fair in Brussels. The showed the IBM 305 random access method of Accounting and Control. They used IBM 305 RAMAC for short. In 1959 IBM came out with a program called Fortran (formula translation.) It was a computer language that was based on algebra, grammar and syntax. The next invention came 12 years later in 1971, it was a landmark though. This was when they came out with the floppy disk, it was called floppy because… well it was floppy. Then in 1975 IBM came out with its first portable computer. It’s was barely portable though because it weighed 50 pounds. It was called the IBM 5100. Some people mistake and say that the 5100 was the first IBM PC, but the first real PC was produced and sold in 1981. It set the standards for PC’s because of IBM’s state of the art inventions. From then on all the other brand of computers were looked at as “clones” or “wannabe’s.” Although the computers that would follow the first one were not a success, IBM’s success would be in the next generation. One of the newest projects that ...