Making the World Work Better: The Ideas That Shaped a Century and a Company

Architecture

Architecture is the story of technological advances coming together to create new systems, which in turn advance our thinking about technology.

A System/360 Model 91 console.

Ben Wood visibly trembled in front of IBM chief executive Thomas Watson Sr. The meeting had started out badly. Watson seemed only semi-interested in the idea that IBM’s tabulating machines could efficiently score standardized tests. Wood, a professor at Columbia University, had pioneered the tests—a concept that would eventually become tests like the SAT. That led to the problem of scoring tens of thousands of tests at once. Wood found himself hiring hundreds ...