
IBM Building 025 - ecliptik
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/ibm-building-025
======
jonjacky
On IBM's architecture around the world, see chapter 3 in _The Interface: IBM
and the Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945 -- 1976_ by John Harwood. The
book is about how architects and designers Eliot Noyes, Edgar Kaufmann Jr.,
Paul Rand, Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen and many others gave IBM
products a consistent look that expressed the corporate philosophy, from
buildings and exhibits through computers and typewriters to publications and
letterhead. The book is online at:

[https://muse.jhu.edu/book/24792](https://muse.jhu.edu/book/24792)

The IBM building in downtown Seattle was built in 1963. Designed by Minoru
Yamasaki, who also designed the Pacific Science Center for the Seattle World's
Fair in 1962 and the original World Trade Center towers in New York City.
During the 1960s, IBM had a working System/360 machine room behind the glass
windows facing the plaza, where the computer and its operators could be seen
by shoppers and passers by.

[https://unicoprop.com/properties/ibm-
building/](https://unicoprop.com/properties/ibm-building/)

------
drfuchs
This is the lab where the world’s very first disk drive was created. The
project got canceled by headquarters, because it would eat into IBM’s cash-cow
punched card business. But they just kept on working on it, being very far
away and hard to keep an eye on.

~~~
11thEarlOfMar
Seems that engineers can be a rebellious lot, a-la Soul of a New Machine:

[https://www.tracykidder.com/the-soul-of-a-new-
machine.html](https://www.tracykidder.com/the-soul-of-a-new-machine.html)

~~~
segfaultbuserr
In the same spirit, Commodore engineer Bill Herd once said [0] the secret of
their (limited) success despite serious mismanagement was,

> _Stay in front of management. Don 't give them a chance to catch up to you._

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Zpv6u5vCJ4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Zpv6u5vCJ4)

------
solumos
There are many such artifacts from IBM's halcyon days. They really spared no
expense in their campuses:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Rochester](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Rochester)

[https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/vintage/vintage_fac...](https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/vintage/vintage_facilities.html)

~~~
fermienrico
I kind of want to go back to 70's America and experience the tech life of a
recently graduated student entering the workforce. Bell Labs, Xerox PARC,
Intel, DARPA, Lockheed Martin SkunkWorks, IBM, HP, Boeing, Westinghouse, GE,
etc.

It was a different era.

~~~
Animats
Indeed.

I visited most of those places in their prime. I saw the bean bag chairs and
the original Alto at Xerox PARC, demoed by Alan Kay. Visited an Intel fab
during the 1K to 4K DRAM transition. The designer of the x86 instruction set
was in my college dorm. I met Bell Labs people in the early days of the
Internet. Worked on some DARPA contracts. Knew people at HP Labs in Palo Alto.
Almost went to work at IBM Almaden Research, which is a big glass building on
a mountain, surrounded by parkland. I happened to be there the day IBM exited
the disk drive business.

It was a small world. The cutting edge of computing technology was a few
hundred people in the US in the early 1970s. Academic computer science
departments were 10-30 people at CMU, MIT, Stanford, and a few other schools.
It wasn't that hard to meet everybody.

All these places were about making it work. Not about getting people to click
on ads.

Of course, many of us had to take a career detour though the Army. And I spent
my first seven years working on operating system maintenance of a big
mainframe OS. Theory and research came later.

~~~
neilv
I'm always pleasantly surprised by the famous names talking on HN.

I started many years later, but still get to meet and sometimes work with some
of those people you mention. I have the impression that I caught the very tail
end of a golden age.

There are still companies making it work, rather than in the business of
exploiting users/humanity, but I had a hard time finding many in my last job
move.

The closest I found was AWS, but I had some side concerns. I ended up instead
picking a startup that was doing something constructive, and seemed like
decent people, and one of the ways they got my attention was by touting in
their initial contact that they don't do blockchain. :)

------
chaoticmass
I've been looking for this episode that covers when Krushchev visted, but it
seems the only way to get it is to buy the DVD.

[https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/cold-
wa...](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/cold-war-roadshow-
krushchev-visits-ibm/)

~~~
jonjacky
The novel _Red Plenty_ by Francis Spufford has an account of Kruschev's visit
to the US. It includes his visit to California but I can't remember if it
includes the IBM visit . It's fiction, but Spufford took pains to be accurate.
He writes that any words he gives to an historical character in the book were
actually said by that character (although maybe not on that same occasion).

~~~
jonjacky
I just checked the book. No IBM visit, not even California, just Washington DC
and New York. Still well worth reading.

