Another excellent film! The scenes of workers assembling the systems in the factory are especially unique (20:05). Each machine took hours of manual labor to assemble and test. Nice bit of history! ~
It looks like a commercial for fridges. All we need is an elegant woman in a beautiful evening dress to come flouncing in and start pawing the cabinets.
The last piece of IBM has officially left the facility here in Endicott, New York on Sept. 1, 2023. Truly the end of an era. The footage the school (10:29 to 10:35) is on North Street in Endicott, across from the original facility. I currently work onsite at one of the newer buildings for a non-IBM company.
It really is amazing what has taken place so quickly. Most of us plebians can barely change a tire, but we still get all the bennies. My Samsung Android phone is now 7 years old, and works perfectly. I bought two backups for it that cost me 150 bucks. How much did your phone's cost you in 7 years? Great camera, great Google and youtube. (Keep your screen dim and you'll prolong your phone life immensely) On my front desk sits a No5 Blickensderfer typewriter from 1896. It's a marvel.
Beautiful views of the IBM 701, aka "Defense Calculator" in operation. Electrostatic memory was a bear to work with and IBM quickly replaced it with magnetic core memory, briefly mentioned toward the end of the film, within a few years. I'd date the film to 1954 but no earlier than 1953.
Ah, core memory. The best part of core memory was, you could drop power to the computer; and when power was restored, the cores would still be in the same position, and could continue.
Still have my Thornton slide rule, Sinclair built calculator and other gizmos from 60s. to 90s. used in my engineering career. Mobile phone has inordinate power in comparison !. IBM were giants . Loved flow charts , box computers and machine time to calculate solutions. Thanks all. Dave
I was surprised how much faster mag tape was than any other medium, by a long way. AND, to the modern eye, it's hard to imagine how memory was such a difficult problem to solve.
I am watching this on on a Apple MacBook Pro. I wonder how much more powerful or should I say faster it is than the whole rooms full of machinery that they show in this film. Teamed with a simple to use Drobo file server or even simpler external data drive I can store and retrieve more information than I can ever need or use (I do concede I am not designing aircraft or something like that, my needs are simple) Plus it did not cost a whole lot of money. It's amazing where are now in less than 100 years. However the complex mechanical machinery, withe their vacuum tubes and electronic assemblies from IBM are still amazing after all these years. As a machinist and person who builds things I find these devices are very interesting.
I can’t imagine how rudimentary we’ll look 70 years from now as this does in 2023. However if past is prologue, as it often is, somehow people in 2093 will say how in the world did they get by way back in 2023? 😂
