Viral Video: IBM Turns 100 | Hacker News Reader

Viral Video: IBM Turns 100

kara.allthingsd.com

52 pointsbjonathan21 comments

One of the strongest memories I have regarding IBM is from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. I visited it on a school trip to Washington years ago, I took with me quite a few very strong memories, and one, was of a machine used by the Germans to help produce the Jewish Registry. It was sat behind some glass, with the easy to recognise IBM logo stamped proudly in the corner.

As I say it was a fair few years ago and I was quite young, but it made me start to realise that business has basically no morals. It's probably shaped the way I view business today. Not super dramatically, don't get me wrong, but this video reminded me of that.

You can Google for IBMs involvement with the holocaust, it's quite interesting.

A corporation is sociopathic by definition.

What's amazing is that it was not just IBM - the germans got oil from Standard Oil, their tanks were made by Opal (a GM subsidiary), and in many other ways the German war effort was financed and enabled by "Allied" conglomerates.

Makes one wonder about the ways we are helping our enemies today...

their tanks were made by Opal (a GM subsidiary)

I came here to check that, but you seem to be right - see the wikipedia article on Opel (note correct spelling)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opel The company ... has been a wholly owned subsidiary of General Motors Company since 1929.

Makes one wonder about the ways we are helping our enemies today

You don't have to wonder - google "US arms sales" or "us arms sales to dictators".

And not only are companies amoral: they force all other companies to become amoral as well. In the end, a lack of morals always allows one to be more competitive.

What I like best about small companies in new markets and startups is that they still have room for positive moral behaviour.

This video is really, really nice. A must look. What is really incredible is that the "Think" motto of IBM is nearly as old as the company and still very up-to-date. Very few people know how involved is IBM in research in "hard" sciences. This video is a good reminder (As a kid I was lucky to travel around the world following my mother who did a lot of collaboration with IBM in the field of Silicium/Germanium electronics, so I am biased).

The point I liked a lot, especially because quite controversial, a little kid telling: "Patents, patents, patents, ..." (near the year 2000).

Great video, enjoyed it a lot.

At 11:53, A man says: "I've discovered a way to build curiosity into a system". Does anyone know who he is and what he means by that?

That part has got to be exaggeration. You know, for example he makes a floor bot that randomly 'explores' the floor to map it out, and somebody says he taught it curiosity.

Otherwise you wouldn't be hearing about it in the background in a 1 second blurb in a promotional self-congratulatory anniversary short, you'd be reading about it in the top news story on HN.

that's Jeff Jonas: http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/

i have no idea what he is talking about

For me ThinkPad is the product that represents IBM best to public - the "Think" in the logo, the feeling at the fingertips when you type, the timeless design, the trackpoint. There was also OS/2 but IBM blew it up badly.

Now that ThinkPad belongs to Lenovo I am wondering if IBM will ever come up with a product used by masses? Because other than this IBM is not visible any more to end users.

Even though the video is focused on IBM, it very much puts into perspective the sheer amount of progress that has been made in computation in 100 years. Its amazing.

As it turns out, a history of IBM is basically the history of computers. Ever hear the phrase "everything thats worth inventing already has been at IBM?" They created RISC and out-of-order, superscalar processing, relational databases, TCM, magnetic hard discs, DRAM, etc. You can bet there's a lot that didn't make it into that video.

Wait, did I hear that correctly. They went from 5 cofounders to 1300 employees in a year!?

This ... this makes me feel really bad about my entrepreneurial efforts.

There is no outsourcing, and everything is done by clerks and secretaries. Every real employee probably has 5 or more support folks behind them.

Too bad they didn't talk about IBM's first invention: the cheese cutter.

Way too long, must have been made by a 60 years old.

Marketing blather. IBM is irrelevant unless you're an old business. Also, I was disappointed they didn't bring up the fact that Watson himself met with Hitler in order to help him automate the Holocaust.

Do you call Medical research old business?

Grandfathered in so to speak.

How are they grandfathered in? Who else is going to solve medical research that isn't a big company like IBM?

Do you expect Medical research to be all hip n cool and use Heroku? Or should they choose IBM for their research into solving complex problems with their custom software and their custom blades?

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