IBM Employees 1956 ENDICOTT & POUGHKEEPSIE, build IBM 650, 705 Mainframe, & 608 Transistor Computer
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 17 เม.ย. 2024
- Computer History: Today we a look at a snapshot in time of the 1956 IBM workforce building computers at the ENDICOTT NY and POUGHKEEPSIE NY plants. Original IBM footage narrated by Walter Cronkite and vintage photos of the time period. IBM workers are building the famous IBM 650 (first mass-produced computer) and the IBM 705 giant mainframe, and the IBM 608 first all-transistorized commercial computer. Original film with explanatory text, and Image Gallery. Film Courtesy of IBM Archives. - Endicott was the birthplace of IBM and has a long record of successful and innovative products throughout its history with IBM. IBM today, headquartered in Armonk, New York, no longer does manufacturing at Endicott. The Poughkeepsie facilities also have a long and impressive history of technical achievements with IBM production. This film takes a brief look at the assembly and testing lines in 1956. Provided for educational and historical review and discussion.
Your comments and thoughts on this time period are welcome. If you had family who had worked at either of these plants, we would love your input as well.
Runtime: 5 mins.
Uploaded by the Computer History Archives Project.
Thank you very much!
Some historic installation firsts for the 650:
The first IBM 650 was installed on December 8, 1954 in the controller's department of the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company in Boston, Massachusetts.
Two IBM 650s were installed at IBM Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory at Columbia University, starting in 1955.
Manulife (Toronto, Ontario) was the first insurance company in Canada to embrace mainframe computer technology with the installation of its IBM 650 in 1956.
The first IBM computer in Australia was a Model 650, installed in IBM's new Sydney Data Centre in 1958. (ACS Heritage Project)
For more information see the following:
-- Bitsavers.org
IBM 650
bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/650/
IBM 705
bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/705/
IBM 608
bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/608/22-6...
Ken Shirriff's blog
www.righto.com/2018/01/examin...
IBM Archives www.ibm.com/history
Internet search for:
“IBM history at Poughkeepsie” and “IBM history at ENDICOTT”
Book: “IBM'S EARLY COMPUTERS,” John H. Palmer, Emerson w. Pugh, Lyle R. Johnson, Charles Bashe, MIT Press, 1985
“14K Days: A History of the Poughkeepsie Laboratory,” the IBM Data Systems Division, 1984, Poughkeepsie, NY
Book: “IBM in Endicott,” Ed Aswas and Suzanne Meredith, Acadia Publishing, 2005 (covers very early IBM history, mostly pre 1955) - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
Neat video. My dad worked at the Poughkeepsie location starting in 1963 and was part of the OS/360 system development team.
Hi @darrellludlow, that must have been quite an interesting and very busy time period. The 360 came out in 1964 or so. Very cool. Thank you for sharing that! ~ Victor, CHAP
Cool! IBM’s investment in the 360 system paid dividends for a long long time. I was using it in 1976.
@@ComputerHistoryArchivesProject Don Ludlow was a principle design and developer and later manager of the Input-Output Supervisor (IOS) component of OS/360. He headed PLS/85 and PLS/86 compiler development. He also authored the program called SUPERZAP, whose file name is IMASPZAP. He worked in the development of SuperC which was first released as an IBM System/370 MVS/VM and IBM PC product and later integrated as part of ISPF/PDF V2.3 Utilities. -- We always had plenty of "Think" pencils and notepads around the house.
Sounds like he certainly was involved in some high tech development. Someone with an exceptional "IQ" as well! Exciting times, to be sure. - Thanks for sharing your info! ~ We hope to have some 370 and MVS/VM video in the future too...
Excellent :) My dad was there on loan from IBM Australia around that period as well, and was heavily involved in the S/360 Model 40 as a world-level support specialist in that line. Later in life, I was also based in Poughkeepsie myself, again in computing but for an Australian company setting up a US office there. What a great place - I miss Poughkeepsie.
Magnetic core memory of 40,000 individual characters? Who would ever need more than that. I know it's a tired joke, but the development of mass storage is something I find really interesting. The germanium slicer and sorter is also something I've never seen before. Thanks for sharing!
We thank all whos hard work technically gave us all what we have today
I'd prefer to throttle back to 2004's technology.
Wonderful. Thank you for sharing.
Thank you. Glad you enjoyed it! ~ VK
Grazie / Thank you for the documentary.
I have a bachelor in CC, I can't figure how this machine technically electronically is designed. In the faculty I designed calculators, FLIP-FLOP, logical gates, etc, lot of assembler. but this is beyond my imagination of complex can be even today. Amazing just amazing.
Hi @svsv9. yes, you make a great observation. Seems if one picks up any computer textbook written between 1950 and 1959, it looks like pages from a calculus textbook. I think you had to love math to understand how computes actually worked back in those days. : )
@@ComputerHistoryArchivesProject❤
I love how advanced we felt in the 1980s
Isn't it funny how Moore's law is battered into submission by the quest for corporate dominance? Yeah, we could do this, but it's going cost us money and we'll lose some competitive advantage if we do this so we'll just keep things status quo. (Yes, I know that's a stretch to apply Moore's Law to that situation (there are hardware limitations).. but I can't think of any other law to demonstrate the shift in corporate strategy from growth to short term gains (except to quote JMK... "In the long run we'll all be dead").
Just a little taste of how far we’ve come… 2:15 The 705 performed a billion instructions over the course of two months. An AMD Threadripper CPU released in 2020 can perform almost 2,500 billion instructions per _second._
Cool. Thanks CHAP 😊
Hi @bblod4896, Thank you. Glad you enjoyed it. 😊 VK
This amazing, i was 8 years old and never knew anything about this, l was more into looking through newspapers than TV but still never this was going on. The people working were really at the top of their tree. The question that l have is why did IBM not be bigger than the rest before all these other builders came along, was it to do with technology being overrun or little investment even by the government.
Not sure if this answers your question, but IBM had a massive sales force even before the "computer" age. They sold punch card accounting machines, typewriters and many other office products. They took first place in electronic computers by the mid 1950's, overtaking Remington Rand (Univac) and others (like RCA, GE, etc.). IBM did have many government contracts too.
@@ComputerHistoryArchivesProject Thankyou.
What percentage of the world’s transistor logic was being produced in IBM’s Endicott plant when they were building those 608’s? 85-90%? Imagine having that kind of market share now.
We could've had we not implemented the Marshall Plan/WTO that rebuilt all of our former enemies manufacturing facilities on our dime while American manufacturers sat comfortably on their fat profits. OK, I'll get down from my soapbox now :-)
Another amazing video, keep up the great work
"I remember when mother used to come home from a hard day assembling transistors..."
I used to pick my feet in Poughkeepsie
TFW no 1956 IBM assembly line GF.
What would happen if i went back to 1956 with a computer of today; Intel 14900KS, 128 GB DDR 5 RAM, 2 TB VNME storage for OS and a synology with 8 22TB Drives and a Nvidia RTX4090 with a 34; HDR 1000, IPS, 144hz QD OLED monitor with the computer running windows 11 ENT and Linux with legecy OSes in VM and a Vive Pro 2 VR headset? and Wikipedia installed and up to date. What would happen if I just went back to 1956 and showed this to those guys? I still have a fantasy of going back in time with the latest in hardware software.
Hi @QuantumParadox, didn't someone once say about civilizations, "any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from Magic." - I bet you would appear to be a magician... or an alien...? but it would be fun.
@@ComputerHistoryArchivesProject that quote I believe was from Arthur C Clark. Yes, it would be fun. :)
@QuantumParadox
You would be detained and arrested as a threat to public safety and order
Boy, those bulky machines look ugly today.
HI @jamesraymond1158, perhaps not "pretty" to some, but I'd love to have one in my garage.. : )