IBM Archives

As I was making a presentation on tape storage I came acrosse this page called the 'IBM Archives' on the outskirts of the IBM website. There's some great historical material in those archives. You can find the history of the IBM logo (from globes to stripes). This one was used from 1924 till 1946.

There were only three others since resulting in the current one with eight bars from 1972 onwards. As we see e.g. here on a System/370 :



My first recollection of a mainframe was the 4381 :



This is just one picture in a row of many in the Mainframe Photo Album.
But there's lots and lots more on the site. There's an Antique Attic, a history on cards and tapes etc. There are also some audio fragments of famous speeches, such as a recording of Thomas Watson in 1915 commenting on the "THINK" motto :

"And we must study through reading, listening, discussing, observing and thinking. We must not neglect any one of those ways of study. The trouble with most of us is that we fall down on the latter -- thinking -- because it's hard work for people to think, And, as Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler said recently, 'all of the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think.' "

In other words : the place to be for those of us who are getting nostalgic from time to time.