Browse Books

Reviewer: Eric A. Weiss

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings [1]. Pugh tells in great and often novel detail how IBM was formed, how it grew, and how it shaped and dominated the computing industry. Finally, he briefly sketches the sad story of its last few years. He starts in 1860 with two chapters about the inventor and entrepreneur Herman Hollerith; devotes ten chapters to the missionary Thomas J. Watson, Sr.; in eight chapters tells about Tom Watson, Jr.'s, leadership; and effectively ends in 1990 with the RISC System/6000. His last chapter is short, hinting at the disasters that resulted when these three giants were replaced by lesser men who thought they knew how to be masters of the game but who lacked their predecessors' absolute commitment, understanding of the importance of technology, and acute alertness to change. He emphasizes the development and application of new technologies; that is, his version of the history of IBM and the computing industry is that it was technology-driven. Because he considers all the other aspects of the business—manufacturing, marketing, sales, service, organization, and management—subordinate to his main theme, they are only discussed in enough detail to give his story coherence. He does not restrict himself entirely to IBM but describes the environment that surrounded it, and provides excellent thumbnail sketches of competing companies and their leaders. This history is superior to all of the many previous books that purported to tell all about IBM, most of which suffered from their authors' ignorance of their subject and journalistic predilection for the sensational. Pugh knows what he is writing about and has been careful to report only what he can document. It is also better than Pugh's earlier books that documented IBM's technological developments [2–4]. They were for specialists, while this—which often covers the same ground in a better way—is addressed to a larger audience: those who are interested in the history of IBM and of computing. Pugh presents substantial new material and often gives a fresh and frank interpretation of what IBM did and why. One of his revelations is the influence that the government had on IBM, both positive and negative. As a 35-year IBM veteran, Pugh evinces a clear and sometimes nostalgic appreciation of what was good about IBM, especially how well managed it was and how well product development was handled. Although he had access to the corporate archives and interviewed many of IBM's living legends, he wrote this book after retirement, without constraints and without manuscript review by IBM. The earlier books seemed to suffer from the effects of manuscript reviews by corporate flacks whose lifetime purpose had been to aggrandize the corporation and its bosses without naming or giving real credit to those major contributors who were not managers. In this book, Pugh names and sketches the careers of the many non-managers to whom IBM owed its technological success. While better than its predecessors in its treatment of several of IBM's major failures, this book does not include all the errors of omission and commission, does not name every IBM computer and component, and is frequently silent or hushed on some important incidents of stupidity and personal misbehavior, some of which Tom Watson himself was willing to cite [5]. This book is an excellent example of a new form of history, a history of technology written by a technologist who was there rather than by a historian who read about it. Computing appears to be the only branch of science and technology that is generating any large amount of this kind of historical writing, the major journal being the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing . Although critical historians may point to the whiggish nature of this history, that is, “a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present” [6], this flaw is offset by the new information and the deep insights that Pugh has expressed about the company he knows so well. Six appendices tabulate important information, and 64 pages of notes give references to support every detail. The index is excellent. This splendid book, which I recommend to everyone interested in the history of IBM, the history of computing, or how to write a history of technical events, may be the last that will have the cooperation of IBM and the unrestricted use of its archives, for the current masters of the corporation are clearly uninterested in history and as a consequence are condemned to repeat it.