Linux on the IBM S/390

About IBM's Corporate Evolution

IBM was incorporated in 1911 as the Computer-Tabulating-Recording Company, as a merger of Computing Scale Co. of America and International Time Recording Co. with Tabulating Machine Co. founded in 1896 by German immigrant Herman Hollerith. Thomas J. Watson, Sr. joined the company in 1914 and became president a few years later. IBM's capsule history is available online for more detail.

IBM in the 1950s reluctantly entered the electronic digital computer age. Rapidly, IBM became both the dominant player in the nascent industry and an international icon of the corporate mentality typified by their motto of "THINK" and by the blue-suited, business-first attitude of their representatives. Also an icon of his time was the stubborn and laconic Thomas J. Watson, Jr, CEO of IBM from 1956 to 1971.

In the 1960s, the IBM 360 processor architecture was introduced, which has remained the flagship of mainframe computing to this day, evolving through the System 370 and System 390 architecture. To the average office worker, however, IBM was better known during this period for the Selectric typewriter.

In the 1970s, IBM encountered antitrust problems with the U.S. Justice Department, at first over the company's contention that competitor's software could be excluded by license from executing on IBM platforms, and later simply over the ability of IBM to stifle competition by its size (IBM had also inspired antitrust action in the 1930s and 1950s.) The result was a series of judgments and a consent decree voided only in the 1990s.

In the 1980s, retrenchment, complacency, and cronyism drove the company economically downhill, paradoxically during the period when it had perhaps its most profound effect on computing by delivering the IBM PC. As the decade closed, it became apparent that IBM had lost the lead in personal computing in light of market rejection of their closed PS/2 hardware architecture (successor to the very-open PC, open down to the full listing of the BIOS assembly code in the manual) and in their hang-fire operating system initiative, OS/2. Mike Cowlishaw's Dictionary of IBM Jargon at that time defined "visionary" as "an IBMer who reads outside literature."

Stockholder rebellion in the 1990s put current CEO Lou Gerstner in charge, the first outsider to hold that post. A series of first-ever layoffs shook IBM morale for a time, but the company has rebounded strongly with initiatives in electronic commerce, web serving of enterprise data, Java, and other Internet tools, leading to the not-entirely inaccurate programming community perception of this century-old institution as pretty hot among the cool companies of our time. An emerging focus at IBM is the compute-everywhere metaphor.

IBM is putting resources behind open source software, and on the Open Source Zone, it maintains a list of packages officially grouped under the open source metaphor. Remember that IBM is the biggest computer software and hardware company on the planet and has many mansions, so to speak. Elsewhere in IBM you will find open source software written by IBMers and/or customers that doesn't appear on that page.