Feature F IBM: Innovation At Its Best
By Maura Keller
Perhaps the most significant event at the IBM Rochester site during the early 1960s – one that would shape the future for IBM Rochester and the corporation – was the announcement that a development laboratory would be established in Rochester. By the end of the 1960s, the
IBM employees with their first built product, the 077 Numeric Collator, in 1956.
first totally Rochester-developed computer, the IBM System/3 was announced.
Fast forward to the late 1980s and a new family of business computers emerged from IBM Rochester – the AS/400. The
I t was 65 years ago that IBM® President Thomas J. Watson, Jr. met with Rochester business, professional, and civic leaders at The Kahler Hotel and announced that after a quiet review of several Midwestern cities, IBM had selected Rochester, Minnesota, as the location of its newest facility. As Tory Johnson, Vice President, IBM Supply Chain Engineering, and Minnesota / Rochester Senior Location Executive, explains, IBM’s beginnings in Rochester were the start of an amazing journey of innovation and change. “For the past 65 years, the journey has been led by thousands of talented, dedicated individuals who have had a vision that providing innovative solutions to IT challenges will enhance businesses, governments, organizations, and the quality of life itself,” Johnson says. “No one could have envisioned the magnitude of technological change IBMers in Rochester have created the past 65 years, nor can anyone chart the next 65 years of innovation.” On August 27, 1956, the first day of operations, Rochester IBMers built their first product, the 077 Numeric Collator, which processed punched cards at a rate of four per second. Within the next 65 years, the IBM Rochester team has collaborated on the design, development, and building of some of the fastest supercomputers the world has ever seen with the most recent capable of performing complex computations at a rate of 200 quadrillion operations per second.
systems were designed and manufactured in Rochester and are the predecessor of today’s IBM i systems, which continue to be an important part of the work done today at IBM Rochester. In the early 2000s, IBM Rochester began creating new business opportunities to best utilize its vast technical talent. By mid-2002, IBMers developed a core concept of providing technology bundled in services as a customer solution by providing unprecedented access to IBM engineers to outside companies. This concept led to IBM-developed processor architecture being the choice of three major gaming platforms for their next-generation systems. “In the past decade, the Rochester team has diversified to meet the needs and challenges of today’s global IT marketplace,” Johnson says. “Rochester IBMers continue advancing the IBM i system, keeping it relevant for its many dedicated business clients.” In addition to hardware and software development, IBMers in Rochester are deeply involved in IBM Cloud, as well as cognitive software and artificial intelligence solutions for business using IBM Watson. Rochester teams also continue their work in supercomputers and have also established themselves as an important part of the IBM Quantum computing efforts, which aim to eventually solve very specific, complex computational problems that are impossible or
| Advantage Magazine 6
July 2021
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