Thomas J. Watson Jr.

Rating

Domains

Scouting report

Took over his father’s punched-card company and moved it into electronic computing over considerable internal objection. The System/360, announced in 1964 after a development effort usually costed at around $5 billion, was the bet: one architecture spanning the whole product line, so a customer’s software survived the next hardware purchase. Backwards compatibility as a commercial strategy starts here, and mainframes running 360-descended code are still in production sixty years later.

Curator’s note

The most expensive product decision anyone in computing had made, and it worked.

Portrait

Painted from a photograph of Thomas J. Watson Jr. by U.S. State department, licensed Public domain.

Sources

• 01Thomas J. Watson Jr. en.wikipedia.org
• 02IBM System/360 en.wikipedia.org