RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.

One of my father’s brothers was a career IBMer who at one time was stationed in Europe, leading the company there, I believe. He was not a very nice man but he helped IBM especially in their internal accounting in the 1950s and did for them in those years things MSFT is getting banged for doing now. He was a street-fighter by nature, which is what IBM needed in those days, probably still does.

I remember in the mid 50s accompanying him to IBM HQ on Wilshire Blvd. in Los Angeles. He lived in NY and his brother, my father, and our family lived near LA so he would visit us periodically while on IBM business. He came in on huge airplanes, a new and wonderful thing to me and extremely expensive. It was a measure of his importance.

On one of these visits, he and I noticed that across the street from IBM on Wilshire, RCA, which was then making computers, had set up their latest and greatest in a huge display window. If memory serves they called them Spectra this and that. My uncle froze in his tracks and stared at this machine and grew livid on the spot. He stormed across the street and we mounted the elevator to the top floor to the West Coast Manager’s office and my uncle told me to wait outside because he had some hard words to say.

But I heard him inside yelling at the manager that if that machine was not out of that window within two or three days he would be out of a job. My uncle was livid with rage and was a large man who could easily terrify people. He had been a Marine in WWII, in the Pacific, saw combat at Guadalcanal, and was a street fighter as a child in a poor lower-West Side neighborhood of New York City.

That RCA machine was out of that window the next day or the day after. How the IBM manager got that done — it was an RCA office — I do not know and probably do not want to know. But it made a deep impression on me.

In the late 60s and I was part of the loose group of people who were styled futurists and whose work Alvin Toffler picked up (i.e. stole) and codified — far below the actual development level — as his volume Future Shock.

In those days the lag between conceptuality and implementation was in years. One of the things we anticipated was that this lag would shorten to days or even hours and that this would restructure the whole world profoundly. I at least did not know about the internet then, but I and others anticipated it — as Teilhard already had — and we foresaw much of what it would mean morally, intellectually and commercially as well as politically. I am very proud of how much we anticipated. People who get credit — Toffler, etc. — often are not those who do the work.

I am a life-long supporter of IBM because of the quality of their work. In the spring of 1972, I did a little experiment. I believed that computers — as communicators, entertainers, home business enhancers — would be in homes. I knew the state of the technology but I was convinced that miniaturization and non-professionalization were possible and would come. I did not know the chip was then being invented. But it was easy to see that the triple evolutionary/involutionary vectors of miniaturization, low energy use and low heat production would make all then-large technology small. The precedents were copious and obvious.

At the time my uncle was I think a VP — not sure of his rank — and I was living with a second cousin of the head of IBM corporate legal. Spring 1972. She died of cancer the next year and I married years later, blessed with a fine wife and family.

Instead of using these contacts, I decided to walk into Armonk off the street and offer my idea of home computing and see what happens. An experiment. 1972, remember, spring. Receptionist looked at me quizzically but with impeccable IBM sang froid and offered me to talk with two reps. With the utmost courtesy these fellows in IBM regulation starched white shirts and ties brought me into a comfortable room and politely inquired of my idea. I said nothing about my uncle and connection at IBM legal. They knew me only as a person off the street.

I laid out the idea of home computing/communication. They said it was impossible: size, expense, technical education. I said I was aware of this situation and that it was momentary and would pass. They said how and I said I did not know but that it would. They thanked me and I thanked them and we parted and I decided not further to press the point with them. My house-mate’s mother urged me to talk with her first cousin, the then-head of IBM legal, but I told her he could come to me. She thought that was arrogant. The family was New York Social Register.

I mention this to indicate something history will not record but which happened. IBM were forewarned, from “within the family” so to speak, did they but know it. I felt that if it came from ground up it would be more effective than coming from the top down, where it would have been just as incredible as it was from the ground up.

And I did not want repeated on home computing the scene I saw in LA more than a decade earlier on RCA’s computer, which was lesser quality than IBM, but I did not care for the process undertaken by my uncle to remove it, believing that process to be non-productive intellectually and therefore, ultimately, commercially.

IBM of that era would have stopped home computing or at least opposed it had they got wind of it from the top first. In 1969 my uncle told me, during lunch at Armonk, they had their product line established for 20 years ahead, through 1989. So top down I knew they would oppose the flattening of the economy, the democratizing of communications, as would AT&T, etc. of that era because their plans did not contemplate such a situation.

I wanted to warn them, to (1) make sure they had no excuse and (2) give them opportunity to warm to the idea from the bottom up, making it look like they had the idea, without giving them occasion to, in MSFT parlance, “knife the baby,” which top management would have done or would have tried to do because their plans were already set 20 years out.

I wanted IBM to lead home computing without giving them the chance to abort it. It was a ticklish procedure and I have always felt I took the best steps I could in the circumstances of the time and in view of my personal position vis-a-vis the company. It was a judgement call. I could have pushed it from the board room.

I never told my uncle what I did. My house-mate’s mother may have told the legal head, but if she did she did not tell me and I never asked. I felt it was safest to plant the idea and let the dynamics take it from there. Although the course has been rough, I am pleased with the result and know the world is, too. IBM are a great company. Their DNA is critical to world leadership and I am proud to have been and to be a supporter.

AMDG