Computer History 1970 Ibm Tom Watson Jr Talks To Employees On Youtube

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Dec 28, 2025, 8:26 AM

computer history 1970 ibm tom watson jr talks to employees on youtube

He modernized a bastion of the global information industry to prepare it for even greater success in the computer age He placed an “all-in” bet on a first-of-its-kind computer and reaped for IBM the fortunes of a new technological age. On the way, Thomas J. Watson Jr. created a marvel of corporate management, nurturing a people-centric culture and expanding progressive social and work policies while piloting the company through a phase of complex and disruptive business modernization to global business dominance. During his time at the helm, revenue at IBM grew nearly tenfold to USD 8 billion, and employee count more than tripled to 270,000.

He built the world’s premier corporate research program and established a leading industrial design practice while positioning IBM for another decades-long run atop its markets. As a corporate citizen, Watson used the IBM pulpit to champion workforce inclusion, forging a lasting legacy of investment and activism in public and in-house diversity programs. Watson joined his father’s company as a salesman in October 1937, following an unremarkable undergraduate education at Brown University. Like all IBM salespeople, he started in the company’s sales school, learning about punched card machinery. When he finished, he was placed in the western half of Manhattan’s financial district, a prime sales territory. He was determined to avoid special treatment as the progeny of the CEO.

An April 1939 wire from his father made it clear that, at least from the elder Watson’s perspective, he was earning his own way in the company. Thomas Watson Sr. sent a memo to his son to herald the achievement of surpassing the annual sales quota by 69%, calling him “a qualified IBM man not by birth or heritage but by your personal ability... When Thomas J. Watson Jr. assumed the chairmanship of IBM in 1956, he inherited the world's most successful data processing company, a market leader generating $300 million annually with nearly 100,000 employees worldwide.

Yet Watson Jr. faced an unprecedented strategic challenge: the electronic computing revolution, initiated by early entrants like UNIVAC and ENIAC, threatened to render IBM's punch card empire obsolete. Rather than defend legacy technology, Watson Jr. executed one of history's boldest strategic gambles: he committed $5 billion (equivalent to $50 billion+ in current dollars, second only to the Apollo Moon program in 1960s spending) to develop System/360, a revolutionary unified... This audacious investment catalyzed not merely a new product line but a complete organizational transformation, restructuring IBM around computers rather than tabulating equipment, establishing software as critical value, and consolidating IBM's dominance in mainframe... By 1971, Watson Jr.

had transformed IBM from a successful but transitional company into the undisputed technology leader of the Cold War computing race, generating $8.3 billion in revenue with 75%+ market share in mainframe computers and delivering... Thomas J. Watson Jr., who had joined IBM in 1937 after graduating from Brown University, spent his early years in sales roles honing his understanding of customer needs and market dynamics. When recruited into senior management during World War II, Watson Jr. proved instrumental in war production and post-war technology initiatives. By 1956, when his father stepped aside, he had spent over a decade preparing for the role of CEO, balancing operational responsibility with familiarity with emerging computing technologies.[1][2]

Watson Jr.'s first major strategic decision in 1956 was to signal that IBM would fully commit to electronic computing, not as a supplementary business line but as the company's defining future. This represented a dramatic pivot from his father's punch card legacy: computers would cannibalize existing revenues, require different sales approaches, demand novel software expertise, and introduce unprecedented technological risk.[2][1] Watson Jr. differed profoundly from his father in technological outlook. While Thomas Watson Sr. had emphasized sales discipline, customer relationships, and incremental innovation, Watson Jr.

recognized that computing represented a fundamental architectural discontinuity requiring bold risk-taking and organizational reinvention. He was willing to bet the company on unproven technologies, a risk appetite that would define his 15-year tenure.[3][1][2] Critically, Watson Jr. also proved more open to delegating technical decision-making to engineers and computer scientists rather than centralizing authority with marketing and sales executives. This cultural shift, bringing technically oriented managers to prominence, would enable the organizational coordination necessary for System/360's extraordinary complexity.[3][1][2] Thomas John Watson Jr.

(January 14, 1914 – December 31, 1993) was an American businessman, diplomat, Army Air Forces pilot, and philanthropist. The son of IBM Corporation founder Thomas J. Watson, he was the second IBM president (1952–71), the 11th national president of the Boy Scouts of America (1964–68) and served on the World Scout Committee (1965-1971), and the 16th United States Ambassador to... He received many honors during his lifetime, including being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. Fortune called him "the greatest capitalist in history" and Time listed him as one of "100 most influential people of the 20th century".[1][2]

Thomas Watson Jr. was born on January 14, 1914, just before his father, Thomas J. Watson, was dismissed from his job at cash register company NCR – an act which subsequently drove Watson Sr., to the foundation of the largest and most profitable digital computer manufacturer in the world,... Two sisters followed Thomas Jr., Jane and Helen, before a final child, Arthur Kittredge Watson, was born. Watson Jr. was raised in the Short Hills section of Millburn, New Jersey.[3]

Both sons were immersed in IBM from a very early age. He was taken on plant inspections – his first memory of such a visit (to the Dayton, Ohio factory) was at the age of five – and business tours to Europe and made appearances... At home his father's discipline was erratic and often harsh. Around the time he was thirteen, Watson suffered from clinical depression.[4]: 32 What the tech pioneer can, and can’t, teach us IBM is one of the oldest technology companies in the world, with a raft of innovations to its credit, including mainframe computing, computer-programming languages, and AI-powered tools.

But ask an ordinary person under the age of 40 what exactly IBM does (or did), and the responses will be vague at best. “Something to do with computers, right?” was the best the Gen Zers I queried could come up with. If a Millennial knows anything about IBM, it’s Watson, the company’s prototype AI system that prevailed on Jeopardy in 2011. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. In the chronicles of garage entrepreneurship, however, IBM retains a legendary place—as a flat-footed behemoth. In 1980, bruised by nearly 13 years of antitrust litigation, its executives made the colossal error of permitting the 25-year-old Bill Gates, a co-founder of a company with several dozen employees, to retain the...

That mistake was the making of Microsoft. By January 1993, Gates’s company was valued at $27 billion, briefly taking the lead over IBM, which that year posted some of the largest losses in American corporate history. But The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived, a briskly told biography of Thomas J. Watson Jr., IBM’s mid-20th-century CEO, makes clear that the history of the company offers much more than an object lesson about complacent Goliaths. As the book’s co-authors, Watson’s grandson Ralph Watson McElvenny and Marc Wortman, emphasize, IBM was remarkably prescient in making the leap from mechanical to electronic technologies, helping usher in the digital age. Among large corporations, it was unusually entrepreneurial, focused on new frontiers.

Its anachronisms were striking too. Decades after most big American firms had embraced control by professional, salaried managers, IBM remained a family-run company, fueled by loyalty as well as plenty of tension. (What family isn’t?) Its bosses were frequently at odds. Meanwhile, it served its customers with fanatical attentiveness, and, starting in the Depression, promised its workers lifetime employment. “Have respect for the individual” was IBM’s creed. Hi there!

You wanted to learn more about the history of tech giant IBM, so I put together this guide going decade-by-decade through IBM‘s story. I‘ll share details on IBM‘s key inventions, acquisitions, controversies, sources of revenue, and the corporation‘s enormous impact on technology and business over 111+ years. IBM stands for International Business Machines, a name it adopted in 1924. But originally IBM was founded in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) by Charles Ranlett Flint in Endicott, NY. Flint combined 4 smaller companies that made punch card and business data processing machines: As a side note, back then punch cards were a cutting-edge way to input data!

The combined CTR company made $9 million in revenue and had 1,300 employees by 1920. In 1914, Thomas J. Watson joined CTR as General Manager and became President in 1915. He played a huge role in growing CTR over the next few decades. Let‘s look at IBM‘s evolution decade-by-decade: In the 1910s and 1920s, CTR (not yet called IBM) mainly made mechanical time recording devices, weighing scales, meat slicers, and electromechanical tabulators that used punch cards to tally census data.

Computer History 1970 Ibm Tom Watson Jr Talks To Employees On Youtube

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