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Silicon City: Computer History Made in New York November 13, 2015 – April 17, 2016 Selected PR Images

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Silicon City: Computer History Made in New York November 13, 2015 – April 17, 2016 Selected PR Images Silicon City: Computer History Made in New York November 13, 2015 – April 17, 2016 Selected PR Images The centerpiece of the IBM Pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair IBM looked to Madison Avenue designers like Paul Rand to craft its was a theater known as “the egg,” designed by architect Eero Saarinen. brand identity, and used the 1964 World’s Fair as a public “coming out Every 15 minutes, 500 curious visitors settled into the “people wall” that party” for the Information Age. rose into the theater, where they were introduced to the magic of the information machine through Charles and Ray Eames’ multi-screen Paul Rand, World’s Fair IBM Booklet, 1964. Courtesy of IBM Corporation media experience “THINK.” Archives. New York World’s Fair IBM Pavilion, 1964. Courtesy of IBM Corporation Archives. Thomas Edison did not invent computers. Yet, all early computers relied Developed by astronomer Wallace Eckert at Columbia University, IBM’s on Edison’s work. While refining his light bulb, Edison noticed that Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC) featured 12,500 electrons in a vacuum flowed from a heated filament to a cooler foil plate. vacuum tubes and more than 21,000 relays. The first computer to store Nearly 30 years later, physicist John Fleming used this “Edison effect” data, the SSEC calculated the positions of the moon and planets, and (thermionic emission) to create the vacuum tube. For half a century, was the last electromechanical calculator ever built. The calculator was vacuum tubes were the voltage regulators and current amplifiers at the installed in IBM’s New York headquarters, where it was operated from heart of radios and other electronic devices, including computers. 1948 to 1952. Matthew Brady, Professor Thomas Edison and His Phonograph, 1878. IBM Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator Operator Console, 1948. Private collection. Courtesy of IBM Corporation Archives. In the wartime era of the 1940s, women dominated the field of In the late 1950s, software was developed to tell flexible and versatile programming, which required connecting cables and setting switches by computers (like the IBM System/360) what to do and how to do it. IBM hand. Those who pioneered this painstaking task were called introduced FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslating) in 1957, a computer “computers,” just as the word “typewriter” once referred to people who programming language suited to calculating numbers and formulas, used typewriting machines. Jean Bartik, Frances Bilas and other women making it ideal for scientists and engineers. COBOL (COmputer Business worked on the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC), Oriented Language), designed for commercial data processing by the developed for the Army during World War II. Department of Defense, debuted in 1959 and is still used today. Its development team included Grace Hopper, called the “mother of Two women wiring the right side of the ENIAC with a new program, ca. COBOL." 1946. Courtesy US Army. Standing: Marlyn Wescoff, Crouching: Ruth Lichterman. Grace Hopper Teaching Cobol, ca. 1960s. Courtesy of Computer History Museum. The Telstar 1 was the product of a multi-national agreement including IBM’s System/360 introduced a series of compatible, general-purpose ATT, Bell Telephone Labs, NASA, the United Kingdom’s General Post machines — flexible computers that could tackle virtually any task simply Office, and France’s National Telegraph and Telephone. The first by changing software. System/360 transformed computing and set the images were broadcasted via satellite on July 23, 1962, and included pattern for today’s world of multipurpose machines. the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge, the New York Harbor and the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Thomas Watson Jr. with IBM 360, 1964.Courtesy of IBM Corporation Archives / Photograph, Mel Koner. Bell Labs Engineers working on Telstar 1, ca 1961. Courtesy of Alcatel-Lucent / Bell Labs. The evolution towards miniaturization laid the foundation for printing Bell Labs experimented with videophones since the 1920s, debuting transistors on microchips for use inside personal computers. By late the picturephone at the 1964 World’s Fair with a call between First 1980s, more than two million components could fit on a fingernail-sized Lady Johnson and engineers at Bell Labs. Cost-prohibitive, with a chip, and the IBM Personal Computer became ubiquitous on office three-minute call costing $200 in today’s dollars, the service faded desktops across America. away in the 1970s. IBM 5150 Personal Computer, 1981. Courtesy of IBM Corporation Picturephone - Opening Ceremonies - Mrs. Lyndon B. Johnson in Archives. Washington chats via see-as-you-talk telephone with Dr. Elizabeth A. Wood, Scientist for Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York, June 24 1964. Courtesy of Alcatel-Lucent / Bell Labs. Filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek created a series of eight computer- New York, home to both Wall Street and Madison Avenue, took center animated projects in collaboration with Kenneth Knowlton at Bell stage in the transformation of electronics from laboratory tools to Laboratories in the 1960s. The videos are cathode-ray mosaics, typically consumer products. IBM particularly distinguished itself by combining brief, non-narrative and abstract. technical innovation with a focus on branding, design, marketing, and sales. Specimens of IBM’s iconic 1961 Selectric typerwriter—epitomizing Stan VanDerBeek, Poemfield # 2, 1966-71. Video still. 16mm film. its consumer-oriented industrial design under Eliot Noyes—will be Realized with Ken Knowlton. Soundtrack: Paul Motian. © Estate of Stan available for visitors to try at the exhibition’s typewriter “bar”. VanDerBeek. Eliot Noyes, IBM Selectric Typewriter, 1961. Courtesy of IBM Corporation Archives. The "Tennis for Two" computer game, developed at Brookhaven National At the climax of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, moviegoers heard the Laboratory on Long Island in 1958 for visitor’s day, was a forerunner to HAL 9000 computer sing “Daisy Bell” (Bicycle Built for Two). The eerie today's modern video game technologies. song was a tribute to Max Mathews, the father of computer music. Writer Arthur C. Clarke had heard Mathews perform the work on an IBM 704 William Higinbotham, Tennis for Two Electronic Game, 1958. Courtesy computer while visiting him at Bell Labs in 1961. Brookhaven National Laboratory. Max Mathews and his Radio Batons, © Peter Menzel / menzelphoto.com .
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