The Future
If you ask a group of IT professionals to name a company that has been successful for
over 100 years, the answer probably would be IBM. As its name suggests, International
Business Machines was a major supplier of typewriters and data processing equipment
long before the computer era. As a longtime IT leader, IBM’s predictions deserve close
attention.
The company that became IBM was founded in 1896 by Herman Hollerith, who
invented the punched card system shown in Figure 1-3. Hollerith wanted to analyze
the 1890 census data, and his idea was brilliant. First, letters and numbers were coded
by being punched into specific locations on a card. His machines then used a simple