The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945–1976

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes F.P. Brooks, ‘Architectural Philosophy’, in, W. Buchholz, ed., Planning a Computer System: Project Stretch (New York, McGraw Hill, 1962), Chapter 2, p. 5. John Harwood, The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945–1976 (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2011). Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1997). See Kenneth Flamm, Creating the Computer: Government, Industry, and High Technology (Washington, DC, The Brookings Institution, 1988), pp. 112–118. The 160A was so successful that IBM's then-rival NCR licensed its own version, the 315. The contractors in question included Tom Simpson, Bob Crabtree and three others; a tiny group at the scale of IBM's operations: see Paul E. Cerruzzi, A History of Modern Computing (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1998), p. 124. The SAGE console, or TX-0, was developed at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, which joined with IBM and the Air Force in producing SAGE installations. See Kent C. Redmond and Thomas M. Smith, From Whirlwind to MITRE: The R&D Story of the SAGE Air Defense Computer (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 2000.) In his history of hacker culture, which dwells at length on the ‘railroad club’, Steven Levy terms the PDP ‘an interactive godsend to the MIT hackers and a slap in the face to IBM fascism’: see Steven Levy, Hackers: heroes of the computer revolution (San Francisco, O'Reilly, 2010), p. vii. A visitor to Digital in its heyday described his arrival as follows: ‘…The main entrance from the visitors’ disintegrating asphalt parking lot was a wooden footbridge across a gully into an upper floor of one of the factory buildings. One entered a fairly large, brightly lighted, unadorned, carpetless section of a loft with a counter and a door at the far end. At the counter a motherly person helped one write down one's business on a card and asked one to take a seat in a row of about seven chairs down the middle of the room. There were a few dog-eared magazines to look at. It was impossible to deduce the principle of their selection or the series of accidents by which they had arrived here. Colorado Municipalities, Cat-Lover's Digest, Psychology Today. After about five minutes, a secretary arrived whose mission was to take me to [my meeting.] Down echoing cement staircases, over covered bridges, through dark brick tunnels, up narrow wooden stairs, through large empty rooms we went to an immense, teeming single room … [where] offices had been set up in a large loft of the factory on an acre of original splintery old fir floor. They consisted of plywood partitions just about head high, strung up on a vast network of two-by-fours … The whole thing looked as if it might have been assembled in four days…': Ben Ross Schnieder, Travels in Computerland (Reading, Mass., Addison-Wesley, 1974), pp. 73–75. P. E. Cerruzi, op. cit., p. 135. Brand wrote an extended feature on the PDP and the world's first video game (created on it) for Rolling Stone in 1972: Steward Brand, ‘SPACEWAR: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums’, Rolling Stone (7th December, 1972), pp. 50–58. Wozniak did not even use a PDP at first, but a Sylvania engineer gave him one of the device's abundantly printed newsprint manuals (which were given away, Whole-Earth style, by DEC salesmen) during a high-school internship. Wozniak called receiving the manual, with its recipe for open, flexible computing, as ‘one of my life's luckiest accidents’: Steve Wozniak, Gina Smith, IWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon : How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It (New York, W.W. Norton & Co, 2006.), p. 54. John Harwood, The Interface, op. cit., p. 153.