Business has, arguably, never been better for IBM than it is at the moment.
Last week, its stock hit an all-time high. It's neck and neck with Microsoft as the world's second most valuable tech company.
IBM's vice president of innovation, Bernie Meyerson,
showed us how Big Blue has come a long way from those punch cards and screens like that.
What IBM innovations have been about, if you get down to it, are the recording and tabulating of data, and then doing something with that data.
It can be computing. It can be deep analytics. It can be any of the above.
Even if you go all the way back to the very beginnings of the IBM company, we're talking 1911, we were about that. We did time clocks.
Fast forward to the time that data really became a huge challenge, was after the Great Depression.
We developed the Hollerith machines that did all of the counting and all of the accounting for, for instance, the rollout of Social Security.
What would you do with 30 million people you had to keep track of?
It's physically impossible without these machines that could, at high speeds, sort the punch cards that had the data on every person in the U.S.
Now, if you move forward into the future, the amounts of data are tens of millions of times more complex.
If you have more data, tens of millions of times, you need to be able to work with it tens of millions of times more quickly, or it's useless.
We came up with things such as this thing here -- the disk drive.
Now, of course, the joke is that monster there, that rather large platter, was part of the original disk drive.
Back then, in the mid-1950s when we invented it, the unit that held five megabits of data, roughly speaking, weighed 10 tons.
To give you some perspective,
today's laptops, if we'd done no further work, would weigh about 250,000 tons: give or take the weight of two big cruise ships.
Now that you've even stored five million bits of data, you have to compute more quickly, and you can't use a mechanical calculator.
So what happened?
We developed the first digital calculators, and they were actually based on things called vacuum tubes.
This actually is a switch. It turns things on and off.
And it does computing for you in this kind of a machine. But it doesn't do a lot -- a couple of thousand operations a second.
OK, so now you move a little further forward and you say, well, we need, for instance, to be able to operate more quickly.
But if you do... disks don't actually store data and release it very quickly.
So we start inventing what they call solid-state memory. This is actually an example of it.
This thing is about 100 bits of data, give or take. That's all, 100 bits. Look at the size of this.
If you fast-forward to the needs of today, you actually wind up with things like this, which are billions of bits.
And, in fact, the chip that has it on it is so tiny that we have to put it in a big holder like this or your fingers couldn't handle it.
Along the way to building the massive computers of today,
there was a remarkable breakthrough that wasn't just really about a chip or a thing, it was, rather, the integrated whole that mattered.
And the thing that IBM did that changed history, frankly, and all of us are familiar with, is we invented the personal computer.
Now, there've been many breakthroughs like that the IBM company has created, not just the personal computer, but, for instance, the Selectric typewriter was another breakthrough.
The magnetic strip on the back of your credit card. The bar code. The excimer laser.
This is simply a new type of laser that is capable of using tremendous electric fields to take things apart as opposed to heat.
So imagine you're reshaping somebody's cornea, which is how you do laser surgery on an eye, and yet you can do that without damaging the underlying tissue.
That's a huge breakthrough. And guess what? That came from IBM.
IBM is here essentially because it has been able, for the last 100 years, to continuously reinvent itself.
That's just incredibly rare, especially in a field that moves at the pace of the field we're in.