Related Articles
Tom Watson Jr. was CEO of IBM during the period when that company created the modern computer industry and launched the digital age. More than Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Ford or even Gates, Jobs, and Bezos, he had a transformational and enduring impact on today’s society, work, and each of our lives. He overcame his father’s harsh judgements, his own deep-seeded insecurities, and depressive tendencies to become what Fortune magazine called “the greatest capitalist who ever lived.”
But from the earliest years of the computer’s history, Watson and IBM encountered resistance to these “thinking machines,” just like spreading fears of generative AI today. Then as now, popular culture projected apocalyptic visions of uncontrolled computer intelligence. Watson pushed back against these concerns through attractive industrial design and multimedia campaigns to win public acceptance for what he termed “a rather sophisticated tool” to eliminate laborious, “repetitive thinking.”
Here is an excerpt from The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived: Tom Watson Jr. and the Epic Story of How IBM Created the Digital Age by Ralph Watson McElvenny, Watson’s grandson, and historian Marc Wortman, publishing on October 24.
ON AN EVENING SOMETIME IN 1954, Tom Watson Jr., at the time IBM’s president, walked along Fifth Avenue. His eyes wandered to an Olivetti typewriter shop, which had recently opened to much fanfare. Olivetti was a leading Italian office equipment and furniture maker renowned for its products’ modern design. The most radical aspect of Olivetti’s design strategy was the integration of industrial design into the product development process, combining design and functionality in everything the company sold. The experience felt like a revelation to him. The machines on display were sleek, available in multiple deep colors, and inviting to touch.
He thought about IBM’s own office products and design process. Comparing the Olivetti typewriters to IBM’s at the time, Watson quipped that like Henry Ford’s “Tin Lizzie,” customers could purchase IBM typewriters in any color “as long as it was black.” Set next to the stylish Olivetti models, they looked like panel trucks alongside Ferraris.
More troubling for Watson was his realization about IBM’s computers: they were “the very epitome of modern technology— on the inside,” but he conceded, “on the outside they were about as exciting as a collection of filing cabinets.” He reflected, “IBM looked obsolete,” not like a dynamic company pushing the frontiers of data-processing technology. The visit to the Olivetti shop jolted Watson. He set off to transform the design of IBM’s products and their surroundings to match the image of a business shaping the future. “I wanted,” he wrote, “to make IBM’s products, offices, buildings, brochures, and everything the public saw of our company exciting and modern.” He also saw the beauty of modern design as key to winning public support for computers and the electronic machines that were already automating business and scientific processes and also threatening people’s jobs and raising the specter of these mysterious “thinking machines” taking control of people’s lives.
Watson’s industrial design education began during WWII when he met Eliot Noyes, the man who would eventually transform virtually every element of IBM’s image over the coming decades. Noyes believed that “machines should look like what they are, not be dressed up in phony streamlining or frills,” Watson recalled. And he embraced Noyes’s modernist perspective and wanted it for IBM. As part of his push into computers, Watson engaged Noyes to reimagine the ground-floor public spaces of the 590 Madison Avenue IBM World Headquarters in anticipation of the installation in 1955 of the new 702 computer, the first large-scale computer developed specifically for business purposes.
While only the very largest corporations could afford such a costly machine, attention to it worked to build broader market interest and wider acceptance of computers and their potential. When it was unveiled, Watson wrote that it “generated enormous excitement.” Many smaller companies rented time on the computer at the Data Processing Center. With the 702 “running around the clock,” he reflected, “if you went by on Madison Avenue in the middle of the night you would see it behind the big plate-glass windows, tended by well-dressed technicians in its brightly lit room.” The New York Times called it IBM’s “new ‘giant brain’ . . . designed from the ground up specifically for business office work.” IBM was increasingly recognized as a company leading the world into the electronic future.
IF WATSON WANTED THE WORLD TO GAZE in wonder and awe at the 702 working away within the “theater” of the IBM showroom, his most significant computer-development project remained almost entirely hidden behind closed doors. The US military-industrial complex proved key to development of the computer industry. “The Cold War,” agreed Watson, “helped IBM make itself the king of the computer business.” Within six months of the Soviet Union exploding its first atomic bomb in 1949, the US Air Force determined that the nation needed an early-warning system to defend against the possibility of Soviet air attack. Air and space-based surveillance was not an option in 1950, making ground-based radar the only possible solution. But by the time technical specialists reading radar monitors could identify enemy intruders traveling through increasingly crowded airspace and communicate their presence to the military, it would be too late to mount a response. The air force determined the nation should build a massive radar network tied to digital computers. The computer system would, in real time, process the air space data from radar tracking stations, identify threats, telephonically distribute electronic information about incoming aircraft to defense installations, and then guide air interceptors and anti-aircraft batteries to destroy any approaching enemy aircraft.
The air force wanted an industrial partner to complete engineering and manufacturing of the first continental air-defense early warning system, a multi-installation network known as SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment). The system would need to operate around the clock with minimal downtime and would represent a huge technological and computing leap.
In April 1953, IBM won a first contract to engineer the SAGE computer, and in September the air force contracted with IBM to build two prototypes. But it was the huge final production order that Watson Jr. “worked harder to win . . . than I worked for any other sale in my life.” He was convinced that whichever company won that contract “was going to be way ahead of the game, because it would learn the secrets of mass production.” In fact, what IBM learned on the project paid for by the government would enable the company to create the interlinked computing future for organizations everywhere.
From its tentative early entries into computing, SAGE took IBM full force into the world of electronic data processing. For the rest of the decade, the project—which cost more than the Manhattan Project to complete—generated 80 percent of IBM’s computer revenues and employed some seven thousand people. IBM gained invaluable experience with large, complex, distributed system designs and multiple new technologies for large-scale computers that would soon be adapted to civilian uses. Among other advances IBM engineers took into its commercial computer development, they had found ways to reduce downtime and to “read” information from radar sensors without having to slow for input of data from punched cards—real-time data-processing. SAGE also relied on cathode-ray-tube screens to input and display processed information, making computing far more intuitive for operators. With these and other in‑house developments, IBM raced ahead in business and scientific computing.
The SAGE system was not publicly announced until early in 1956 and began running the following year. By the time the SAGE program was phased out in the 1980s, IBM had built, installed, and maintained fifty-six interconnected computer systems—each requiring an acre of floor space in massive windowless bunkers. SAGE was integral to NORAD (North American Air—later Aerospace—Defense) Command’s air defense system scanning the skies for Soviet aircraft and rockets. It was the first geographically distributed, online, real-time application of digital computers in the world.
The SAGE program enabled IBM to expand R&D, build automated computer-manufacturing plants, and attract and train thousands of employees specialized in electronics, computer programming, and systems networking. Most significantly for IBM and computing’s future integration throughout society, IBM engineers adapted the hardware and software that made up the SAGE system for real-time management of large-scale business and scientific operations over geographically dispersed computers linked together into communications networks.
IBM’s successful implementation of SAGE drew other government agencies and private companies to contract with IBM for teleprocessing computer systems of their own. Pulling together advances derived from SAGE and other high-performance computer systems, IBM engineers worked with American Airlines for nearly a decade to develop the world’s first comprehensive, online computer airline reservations network. When SABRE (Semi-Automatic Business Environment Research) went online in 1964, the system linked 1,100 reservation desks in sixty US cities across twelve thousand miles of high- speed telephone lines. SABRE grew to handle passenger data, rental-car information, crew scheduling, flight planning, fuel management, waiting-room displays, standby passenger lists, and aircraft maintenance reporting. Later generations of SABRE remain in operation today as an independent worldwide airline reservation system.
IBM also employed what it was learning from SAGE and other advanced technologies to produce its 704 computer, IBM’s first computer with a dedicated floating-point unit to handle decimal-point number calculations, thus able to carry out arithmetic operations wherever the decimal point fell within a number. That made it the first widely used machine able to race through complex scientific and technical mathematics. Its users at IBM and elsewhere developed FORTRAN and other seminal programming languages for numeric computing that led to some of the earliest artificial-intelligence advances, from the first synthesized human speech and music to satellite orbital tracking and some of the first game-playing programs, including checkers and chess.
BUT MUCH OF THE PUBLIC REMAINED MYSTIFIED by these new machines entering their lives. Watson believed and often reiterated that “good design was good business” and hired famed furniture makers Charles Eames and his wife Ray to head the creative team behind IBM’s efforts to generate wider understanding of the computer and its value to individuals and society. Watson engaged the Eameses to orchestrate a multimedia campaign of exhibitions, films, and spectacles to convey the idea that computers extended human capabilities and would change the world for the better. As part of that effort, the Eameses designed the massive IBM pavilion for the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair. The exhibit covered an entire acre and included a man-made grove of forty-five thirty-two-foot-high rust-color trees among which visitors wandered walkways where they viewed various theatrical presentations about different aspects of information processing before climbing aboard a five-hundred-seat, steeply raked grandstand. The entire grandstand then rose up above the “treetops” into a ninety-foot-high white domed theater, shaped like the IBM Selectric typewriter type ball, with the IBM logo imprinted on its outside four thousand times. The audience inside the “Information Machine” viewed fifteen curved screens of various sizes and shapes on the theater wall that combined different images and films to illustrate how computers solved complex problems through logical and mathematical simplification.
The essence of IBM’s costly World’s Fair presence served, the design team wrote, “to remove the mystique surrounding computer systems.” But they also wanted the experience “to convey this sense of wonder and marvel in the world of computers.” For IBM, along with publicity for its business, the goal was to promote wider acceptance, understanding, and even enthusiasm for computers—and allay fears.
IBM’s World’s Fair pavilion drew just short of eleven million visitors. Among the millions, most knew little about these massive new machines that increasingly populated large corporate and government offices and labs. But many feared that these mysterious, new “robotic brains” would take their jobs, reduce human individuality, and depersonalize or even control society. IBM computers were beating humans at games and singing songs in the early days of artificial intelligence, which was exciting and charming to observe, but SAGE and other computerized defense systems were also augmenting human analysis and automating decision-making and control of strategic launch commands, with presumed doomsday possibilities.
Watson viewed fears that autonomous machines would replace humans, increasingly expressed in popular culture, as misplaced and a daunting public-relations challenge. He genuinely believed that computers would remain a tool useful in impossible‑to‑predict ways, and a labor-saving boon for society. He used his personal fame and standing to educate the public and combat resistance to computers. In a 1964 film, he sits in a comfortable leather chair and, with a steady gaze into the camera, and says, “A lot of people will tell you that computers are going to take over our life.” But in measured tones he explains that he has “never thought of them as anything more than a rather sophisticated tool” to eliminate laborious, “repetitive thinking.” He offered viewers his hope that, in the coming decades, computers would help solve America’s “immense social problems” and “get the United States on the right track.”
But films such as Dr. Strangelove in 1964 and best-selling novels like 1962’s Fail-Safe (also a popular 1964 film) reflected and fueled public fears of dependence upon out‑of‑control thinking machines for the military. IBM’s own powerful, disciplined corporate culture, while generating immense business success, also provoked dread that, like HAL 9000 (an obvious IBM reference with its shift of each letter to the one before it in the alphabet), the reasoning computer in 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, someday the thinking machines would run amok.
You can order a copy of The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived here.
