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71-717: The contract to build the Mark II was signed with Harvard in February 1945, after the successful demonstration of the Mark I in 1944. It was completed and debugged in 1947, and delivered to the US Navy Proving Ground at Dahlgren, Virginia in March 1948, becoming fully operational by the end of that year. The Mark II was constructed with high-speed electromagnetic relays instead of the electro-mechanical counters used in

142-716: A 50-foot (15 m) drive shaft coupled to a 5 horsepower (3.7 kW) electric motor, which served as the main power source and system clock . From the IBM Archives: The Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (Harvard Mark I) was the first operating machine that could execute long computations automatically. A project conceived by Harvard University’s Dr. Howard Aiken, the Mark I was built by IBM engineers in Endicott, N.Y. A steel frame 51 feet long and 8 feet high held

213-582: A company to design and build his calculator in early 1937. After two rejections, he was shown a demonstration set that Charles Babbage ’s son had given to Harvard University 70 years earlier. This led him to study Babbage and to add references to the Analytical Engine to his proposal; the resulting machine "brought Babbage’s principles of the Analytical Engine almost to full realization, while adding important new features." The ASCC

284-580: A diplomatic and a business perspective. He was known as US President Franklin D. Roosevelt 's unofficial ambassador in New York and often entertained foreign statesmen. In 1937, he was elected president of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) and at that year's biennial congress in Berlin stated that the conference keynote would be "World Peace Through World Trade." That phrase became

355-479: A dominant company that the federal government filed a civil antitrust suit against it in 1952. IBM owned and leased to its customers more than 90 percent of all tabulating machines in the United States at the time. When Watson died in 1956, IBM's revenues were $ 897 million, and the company had 72,500 employees. Throughout his life, Watson maintained a deep interest in international relations, from both

426-438: A paper plan for such a machine and took this paper plan across the country to some 20 concerns that we thought could use such a machine. I would like to tell you that the machine rents for between $ 12,000 and $ 18,000 a month, so it was not the type of thing that could be sold from place to place. But, as a result of our trip, on which we expected to get orders for five machines, we came home with orders for 18." Watson Jr. later gave

497-416: A second. A multiplication took 6 seconds, a division took 15.3 seconds, and a logarithm or a trigonometric function took over one minute. The Mark I read its instructions from a 24-channel punched paper tape . It executed the current instruction and then read the next one. A separate tape could contain numbers for input, but the tape formats were not interchangeable. Instructions could not be executed from

568-410: A slightly different version of the story in his autobiography, where he said the initial market sampling indicated 11 firm takers and 10 more prospective orders. " THINK " – Watson began using "THINK" to motivate, or inspire, staff while at NCR and continued to use it at CTR. International Business Machines's first U.S. trademark was for the name "THINK" filed as a U.S. trademark on June 6, 1935, with

639-721: A time as an international Scout commissioner. E. Urner Goodman recounts that the elderly Watson attended an international Scout commissioners' meeting in Switzerland , where the IBM founder asked not to be put on a pedestal. Before the conference was over, Goodman relates, Watson "... sat by that campfire, in Scout uniform, 'chewing the fat' like the rest of the boys". He received the Silver Buffalo Award in 1944. His son, Thomas Jr., later served as national president of

710-421: A unique identifying index number. These numbers were represented in binary on the control tape. The first field was the binary index of the result of the operation, the second was the source datum for the operation and the third field was a code for the operation to be performed. In 1928 L.J. Comrie was the first to turn IBM "punched-card equipment to scientific use: computation of astronomical tables by

781-491: A week as bookkeeper for Clarence Risley's Market in Painted Post. One year later he joined a traveling salesman, George Cornwell, peddling organs and pianos around the farms for William Bronson's local hardware store. When Cornwell left, Watson continued alone, earning $ 10 per week. After two years of this life, he realized he would be earning $ 70 per week if he were on a commission. His indignation on making this discovery

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852-590: Is Tom Watson, then IBM chairman, who said in 1958: 'I think there is a world market for about five computers. ' " The earliest known citation on the Internet is from 1986 on Usenet in the signature of a poster from Convex Computer Corporation as " 'I think there is a world market for about five computers' —Remark attributed to Thomas J. Watson (Chairman of the Board of International Business Machines), 1943". All these early quotes are questioned by Eric Weiss, an editor of

923-404: Is the namesake of Watson Hall , a campus residence hall. In 1936 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision that IBM, together with Remington Rand, should cease its practice of requiring its customers to buy their punch cards from it alone. The ruling made little difference because IBM was the only effective supplier to the market, and profits continued undiminished. In 1937, Watson

994-572: The Annals of the History of Computing in ACS letters in 1985. There are documented versions of similar quotes by other people in the early history of the computer. In 1946 Sir Charles Darwin (grandson of the famous naturalist), head of Britain's NPL (National Physical Laboratory), where research into computers was taking place, wrote: it is very possible that ... one machine would suffice to solve all

1065-807: The Binghamton area, where IBM was founded and had major plants. In 1946, IBM provided land and funding for Triple Cities College, an extension of Syracuse University . Later it became known as Harpur College, and eventually evolved into Binghamton University . After World War II, Watson began work to further the extent of IBM's influence abroad and in 1949, he created the IBM World Trade Corporation in order to oversee IBM's foreign business. Watson retired in 1956 and his oldest son, Thomas J. Watson Jr. , became IBM's CEO. Watson Sr. died on June 19, 1956, in Manhattan, New York City and

1136-555: The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) found it difficult to manage the five companies. He hired Watson as general manager on May 1, 1914, when the five companies had about 1,300 employees. Eleven months later Watson was made President when court cases relating to his time at NCR were resolved. Within four years revenues had been doubled to $ 9 million. In 1924, he renamed CTR to International Business Machines. Watson built IBM into such

1207-658: The Order of the German Eagle medal that Watson received at the Berlin ICC meeting in 1937, as evidence that he was being honored for the help that IBM's German subsidiary Dehomag (Deutsche Hollerith-Maschinen Gesellschaft mbH) and its punch card machines provided the Nazi regime, particularly in the tabulation of census data (which included the location of Jews). Another study argues that Watson believed, perhaps naively, that

1278-481: The Trinity and Fat Man bombs, was likely faster and more efficient than the gun design." Aiken published a press release announcing the Mark I listing himself as the sole inventor. James W. Bryce was the only IBM person mentioned, even though several IBM engineers including Clair Lake and Frank Hamilton had helped to build various elements. IBM chairman Thomas J. Watson was enraged, and only reluctantly attended

1349-749: The US Navy base at Dahlgren, Virginia . The Mark IV was built for the US Air Force , but it stayed at Harvard. The Mark I was disassembled in 1959, and portions of it went on display in the Science Center , as part of the Harvard Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments . It was relocated to the new Science and Engineering Complex in Allston in July 2021. Other sections of

1420-551: The United States Army Air Corps and became a bomber pilot. He was soon hand-picked to become the assistant and personal pilot for General Follet Bradley, who was in charge of all Lend-Lease equipment supplied to the Soviet Union from the United States. Watson Sr.'s youngest son, Arthur K. Watson , also joined the military during the conflict. Watson worked with local leaders to create a college in

1491-439: The "1% doctrine" for war profits which mandated that IBM receive no more than 1% profit from the sales of military equipment to U.S. Government. Watson was one of the few CEOs to develop such a policy. In 1941, Watson received the third highest salary and compensation package in the U.S., $ 517,221, on which he paid 69% in tax. Watson had a personal interest in the progress of the war. His eldest son, Thomas J. Watson Jr., joined

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1562-472: The 1950s that he foresaw a market potential for only five electronic computers. The document says no, but quotes his son and then IBM President Thomas J. Watson Jr. at the annual IBM stockholders meeting, April 28, 1953, as speaking about the IBM 701 Electronic Data Processing Machine, which it identifies as "the company's first production computer designed for scientific calculations". He said that "IBM had developed

1633-613: The Boy Scouts from 1964 to 1968. He was also inducted into the Steuben County, New York Hall of Fame. Throughout his life Watson continued to own and enjoy the family farm on which he was born. In 1955 he and his wife gave it, along with one million dollars, to the Methodist Church for use as a retreat and conference center, to be named Watson Homestead in memory of his parents. Watson Homestead became independent of

1704-481: The Mark I computed values to eighteen decimal places . Additionally, Mark I integrated the partial differential equation at a much smaller interval size [or smaller mesh] and so...achieved far greater precision . "Von Neumann joined the Manhattan Project in 1943, working on the immense number of calculations needed to build the atomic bomb. He showed that the implosion design, which would later be used in

1775-403: The Mark I was designed by futuristic American industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes at IBM's expense. Aiken was annoyed that the cost ($ 50,000 or more according to Grace Hopper ) was not used to build additional computer equipment. The Mark I had 60 sets of 24 switches for manual data entry and could store 72 numbers, each 23 decimal digits long. It could do 3 additions or subtractions in

1846-566: The Mark I, making it much faster than its predecessor. It weighed 25 short tons (23 t) and occupied over 4,000 square feet (370 m) of floor space. Its addition time was 0.125 seconds (8 Hz) and the multiplication time was 0.750 seconds. This was a factor of 2.6 faster for addition and a factor of 8 faster for multiplication compared to the Mark I. It was the second machine (after the Bell Labs Relay Calculator) to have floating-point hardware. A unique feature of

1917-490: The Mark II is that it had built-in hardware for several functions such as the reciprocal, square root, logarithm, exponential, and some trigonometric functions. These took between five and twelve seconds to execute. Additionally, the Mark II was actually composed of two sub-computers that could either work in tandem or operate on separate functions, to cross-check results and debug malfunctions. The Mark I and Mark II were not stored-program computers – they read instructions of

1988-565: The United States in December 1941, and the German shareholders took custody of the Dehomag operation. However, during World War II , IBM subsidiaries in occupied Europe never stopped delivery of punch cards to Dehomag, and documents uncovered show that senior executives at IBM world headquarters in New York took great pains to maintain legal authority over Dehomag's operations and assets through

2059-710: The calculations that would ever be needed in this country could be done on the three digital computers which were then being built—one in Cambridge, one in Teddington , and one in Manchester. No one else, he said, would ever need machines of their own, or would be able to afford to buy them. Howard H. Aiken made a similar statement in 1952: Originally one thought that if there were a half dozen large computers in this country, hidden away in research laboratories, this would take care of all requirements we had throughout

2130-454: The calculator, which consisted of an interlocking panel of small gears, counters, switches and control circuits, all only a few inches in depth. The ASCC used 500 miles (800 km) of wire with three million connections, 3,500 multipole relays with 35,000 contacts, 2,225 counters, 1,464 tenpole switches and tiers of 72 adding machines, each with 23 significant numbers. It was the industry’s largest electromechanical calculator. The enclosure for

2201-650: The church in 1995, and continues as a conference and retreat center. The one-room school that Watson attended as a child is still on the grounds. Watson was chairman of the Elmira College centennial committee in 1955 and donated Watson Hall, primarily a music and mathematics academic building. Watson was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1960) and the American Philosophical Society (1984). He

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2272-401: The company into a highly effective selling organization, based largely on punched card tabulating machines . Watson authorized providing Hitler's Third Reich with data processing solutions and involved IBM in cooperation with Nazi Germany throughout the 1930s and until the end of World War II , profiting from both the German and American war efforts. A leading self-made industrialist, he

2343-631: The country. The story already had been described as a myth in 1973; the Economist quoted a Mr. Maney as "revealing that Watson never made his oft-quoted prediction that there was 'a world market for maybe five computers. ' " Since the attribution typically is used to demonstrate the fallacy of predictions, if Watson had made such a prediction in 1943, then, as Gordon Bell pointed out in his ACM 50 years celebration keynote, it would have held true for some ten years. The IBM archives of Frequently Asked Questions notes an inquiry about whether he said in

2414-590: The dedication ceremony on August 7, 1944. Aiken, in turn, decided to build further machines without IBM's help, and the ASCC came to be generally known as the "Harvard Mark I". IBM went on to build its Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC) to both test new technology and provide more publicity for the company's efforts. The Mark I was followed by the Harvard Mark II (1947 or 1948), Mark III/ADEC (September 1949), and Harvard Mark IV (1952) – all

2485-605: The demand by the US economy at a maximum of five. Later attributions may be found in The Experts Speak , a book written by Christopher Cerf and Victor S. Navasky in 1984, however Cerf and Navasky just quote from a book written by Morgan and Langford, Facts and Fallacies . Another early article source (May 15, 1985) is a column by Neil Morgan, a San Diego Evening Tribune writer who wrote: "Forrest Shumway, chairman of The Signal Cos., doesn't make predictions. His role model

2556-452: The description "periodical publications". This trademark was filed fourteen years before the company filed for a U.S. trademark on the name IBM. A biographical article in 1940 noted that "This word is on the most conspicuous wall of every room in every IBM building. Each employee carries a THINK notebook in which to record inspirations. The company stationery, matches, scratch pads all bear the inscription, THINK. A monthly magazine called 'Think'

2627-659: The family farm in East Campbell and attended the District School Number Five in the late 1870s. As Watson entered his teen years he attended Addison Academy in nearby Addison . Having given up his first job—teaching—after just one day, Watson took a year's course in accounting and business at the Miller School of Commerce in Elmira, New York . He left the school in 1891, taking a job at $ 6

2698-484: The first programs to run on the Mark I was initiated on 29 March 1944 by John von Neumann . At that time, von Neumann was working on the Manhattan Project , and needed to determine whether implosion was a viable choice to detonate the atomic bomb that would be used a year later. The Mark I also computed and printed mathematical tables, which had been the initial goal of British inventor Charles Babbage for his analytical engine in 1837. According to Edmund Berkeley ,

2769-413: The implosion. In March 1944, he proposed to run certain problems regarding implosion of the Mark I, and in 1944 he arrived with two mathematicians to write a simulation program to study the implosion of the first atomic bomb . The Los Alamos group completed its work in a much shorter time than the Cambridge group. However, the punched-card machine operation computed values to six decimal places, whereas

2840-470: The lost property. Word got around, of course, and it took Dad more than a year to find another steady job. Watson would later enforce strict rules at IBM against alcohol consumption, even off the job. According to Tom Jr.: This anecdote never made it into IBM lore, which is too bad, because it would have helped explain Father to the tens of thousands of people who had to follow his rules. Watson's next job

2911-477: The machine; some had been IBM employees before being required to join the Navy to work on the machine. This technical team was not informed of the overall purpose of their work while at Harvard. The 24 channels of the input tape were divided into three fields of eight channels each. Each storage location, each set of switches, and the registers associated with the input, output , and arithmetic units were assigned

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2982-602: The medal was in recognition of his years of labor on behalf of global commerce and international peace. Because of his strong feelings about the issue, Watson wanted to return his German citation shortly after receiving it. When Secretary of State Hull advised him against that course of action, he gave up the idea until the spring of 1940. Then Hull refused advice, and Watson sent the medal back in June 1940. Dehomag's management disapproved of Watson's action and considered separating from IBM. This occurred when Germany declared war on

3053-403: The method of finite differences, as envisioned by Babbage 100 years earlier for his Difference Engine". Very soon after, IBM started to modify its tabulators to facilitate this kind of computation. One of these tabulators, built in 1931, was The Columbia Difference Tabulator. John von Neumann had a team at Los Alamos that used "modified IBM punched-card machines" to determine the effects of

3124-604: The operators of the Mark I often called the machine "Bessy, the Bessel engine", after Bessel functions . The Mark I was disassembled in 1959; part of it was given to IBM, part went to the Smithsonian Institution , and part entered the Harvard Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments . For decades, Harvard's portion was on display in the lobby of the Aiken Computation Lab. About 1997, it

3195-459: The original machine had much earlier been transferred to IBM and the Smithsonian Institution . Thomas J. Watson Thomas John Watson Sr. (February 17, 1874 – June 19, 1956) was an American businessman who was the chairman and CEO of IBM . He oversaw the company's growth into an international force from 1914 to 1956. Watson developed IBM's management style and corporate culture from John Henry Patterson's training at NCR . He turned

3266-477: The personal intervention of IBM managers in neutral Switzerland , directed via personal communications and private letters, which confirms the close ties between the company’s headquarters and its subsidiaries throughout the war. During this same period, IBM became more deeply involved in the war effort for the U.S., focusing on producing large quantities of data processing equipment for the military and experimenting with analog computers . Watson Sr. also developed

3337-666: The problems that are demanded of it from the whole country. In 1985 the story was discussed on Usenet (in net.misc), without Watson's name being attached. The original discussion has not survived, but an explanation has; it attributes a very similar quote to the Cambridge mathematician Professor Douglas Hartree , around 1951: I went to see Professor Douglas Hartree, who had built the first differential analyzers in England and had more experience in using these very specialized computers than anyone else. He told me that, in his opinion, all

3408-517: The program one at a time from a tape and executed them. The Mark II had a peculiar programming method that was devised to ensure that the contents of a register were available when needed. The tape containing the program could encode only eight instructions, so what a particular instruction code meant depended on when it was executed. Each second was divided up into several periods, and a coded instruction could mean different things in different periods. An addition could be started in any of eight periods in

3479-500: The public because of the efforts of Patterson and Watson to help those affected by the Great Dayton Flood of 1913, but efforts to have them pardoned by President Woodrow Wilson were unsuccessful. However, their convictions were overturned on appeal in 1915 on the grounds that important defense evidence should have been admitted. Charles Ranlett Flint , who had engineered the amalgamation (via stock acquisition) forming

3550-432: The second, a multiplication could be started in any of four periods of the second, and a transfer of data could be started in any of twelve periods of the second. Although this system worked, it made the programming complicated, and it reduced the efficiency of the machine somewhat. The Mark II is also known for being the computer with the first recorded instance of an actual bug (a moth) disrupting its operation. The insect

3621-770: The second-in-command at NCR. In four years Watson made Rochester effectively an NCR monopoly by using the technique of knocking the main competitor, Hallwood, out of business, sometimes resorting to sabotage of the competitor's machines. As a reward, he was called to the NCR head office in Dayton, Ohio . In 1912, the company was found guilty of violating the Sherman Antitrust Act . Patterson, Watson, and 26 other NCR executives and managers were convicted for illegal anti-competitive sales practices and were sentenced to one year of imprisonment. Their convictions were unpopular with

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3692-481: The shop's new owner. On visiting NCR he met its Buffalo branch manager, John J. Range, and asked him for a job. Determined to join the company, he repeatedly called on Range until, after a number of abortive attempts, he finally was hired in November 1896, as sales apprentice to Range. Led by John Patterson , NCR was then one of the leading selling organizations, and Range became almost a father figure for Watson and

3763-683: The slogan of both the ICC and IBM. In 1937, as President of the International Chamber of Commerce, Watson met Adolf Hitler . During the 1930s, IBM's German subsidiary was its most profitable foreign operation, and a 2001 book by Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust , claims that Watson's pursuit of profit led him to personally approve and spearhead IBM's strategic technological relationship with Nazi Germany . It describes how IBM provided

3834-723: The storage registers. Because instructions were not stored in working memory, it is widely claimed that the Harvard Mark I was the origin of the Harvard architecture . However, this is disputed in The Myth of the Harvard Architecture published in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing , which shows the term 'Harvard architecture' did not come into use until the 1970s (in the context of microcontrollers) and

3905-557: The tabulating equipment Hitler used to round up the Jews. His Hollerith punch-card machines are in the Holocaust Museum today. The book describes IBM's punch cards as "a card with standardized holes", each representing a different trait of the individual. The card was fed into a "reader" and sorted. Punch cards identified Jews by name. Each one served as "a twentieth-century bar code for human beings". In particular, critics point to

3976-466: The tape (literally creating a loop ). At first, conditional branching in Mark I was performed manually. Later modifications in 1946 introduced automatic program branching (by subroutine call). The first programmers of the Mark ;I were computing pioneers Richard Milton Bloch , Robert Campbell, and Grace Hopper . There was also a small technical team whose assignment was to actually operate

4047-402: The words present in any contemporary articles about IBM. One of the first attributions is in the German magazine Der Spiegel of May 22, 1965, stating that IBM boss Thomas Watson had not been interested in the new machines initially, and when the first commercial calculation behemoths appeared in the early 1950s, filling whole floors with thousands of heat generating vacuum tubes, he estimated

4118-489: The work of Aiken. The Mark II was an improvement over the Mark I, although it still was based on electromechanical relays . The Mark III used mostly electronic components — vacuum tubes and crystal diodes —but also included mechanical components: rotating magnetic drums for storage, plus relays for transferring data between drums. The Mark IV was all-electronic, replacing the remaining mechanical components with magnetic core memory . The Mark II and Mark III were delivered to

4189-511: Was a model for his sales and management style. Under Range's guidance Watson became the most successful salesman in the East, earning $ 100 per week. In a 1952 interview Watson claimed he learned more from Range than anyone else. Four years later, NCR assigned Watson to run the struggling NCR agency in Rochester, New York . As an agent, he got 35% commission and reported directly to Hugh Chalmers,

4260-587: Was awarded the Order of the German Eagle by Adolf Hitler . Watson was also president of the International Chamber of Commerce in 1937; the medal was awarded while the ICC was meeting in Germany that year. In 1939, he received an honorary degree in Doctor of Commercial Science from Oglethorpe University . In the 1940s, Watson was on the national executive board of the Boy Scouts of America and served for

4331-459: Was built from switches , relays , rotating shafts , and clutches . It used 765,000 electromechanical components and hundreds of miles of wire, comprising a volume of 816 cubic feet (23 m ) – 51 feet (16 m) in length, 8 feet (2.4 m) in height, and 2 feet (0.61 m) deep. It weighed about 9,445 pounds (4.7 short tons; 4.3 t). The basic calculating units had to be synchronized and powered mechanically, so they were operated by

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4402-681: Was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Sleepy Hollow, New York . Watson married Jeanette Kittredge, from a prominent Dayton, Ohio , railroad family, on April 17, 1913. They had two sons and two daughters. As a Democrat (after his criminal indictment by the Taft Administration), Watson was an ardent supporter of Roosevelt. He was one of the most prominent businessmen in the Democratic Party. He

4473-399: Was considered Roosevelt's strongest supporter in the business community. Watson served as a powerful trustee of Columbia University from June 6, 1933, until his death. He engineered the selection of Dwight D. Eisenhower as its president and played the central role in convincing Eisenhower to become president of the university. Additionally, he served as a trustee of Lafayette College and

4544-526: Was developed and built by IBM at their Endicott plant and shipped to Harvard in February 1944. It began computations for the US Navy Bureau of Ships in May and was officially presented to the university on August 7, 1944. Although not the first working computer , the machine was the first to automate the execution of complex calculations, making it a significant step forward for computing. The ASCC

4615-409: Was extracted from the machine's electronics and taped to the log book, with the note "first actual case of [a] bug being found", on September 9, 1947. Harvard Mark I The Harvard Mark I , or IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator ( ASCC ), was one of the earliest general-purpose electromechanical computers used in the war effort during the last part of World War II . One of

4686-435: Was moved to the Harvard Science Center . In 2021, it was moved again, to the lobby of Harvard's new Science and Engineering Complex in Allston, Massachusetts . The original concept was presented to IBM by Howard Aiken in November 1937. After a feasibility study by IBM engineers, the company chairman Thomas Watson Sr. personally approved the project and its funding in February 1939. Howard Aiken had started to look for

4757-415: Was one of the richest men of his time when he died in 1956. Thomas J. Watson was born in Campbell, New York , in the state's Southern Tier region, the fifth child and only son of Thomas and Jane Fulton White Watson. His four older siblings were Jennie, Effie, Loua, and Emma. His father farmed and owned a modest lumber business located near Painted Post , a few miles west of Corning . Thomas worked on

4828-405: Was only retrospectively applied to the Harvard machines, and that the term could only be applied to the Mark III and IV , not to the Mark I or II . The main sequence mechanism was unidirectional. This meant that complex programs had to be physically lengthy. A program loop was accomplished by loop unrolling or by joining the end of the paper tape containing the program back to the beginning of

4899-490: Was peddling shares of the Buffalo Building and Loan Company for a huckster named C. B. Barron, a showman renowned for his disreputable conduct, which Watson deplored. Barron absconded with the commission and the loan funds. Next Watson opened a butcher shop in Buffalo, which soon failed, leaving Watson with no money, no investment, and no job. Watson had a newly acquired NCR cash register in his butcher shop, for which he had to arrange transfer of its installment payments to

4970-407: Was posthumously inducted into the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame in 1990. Although Watson is well known for his alleged 1943 statement, "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers," there is scant evidence he said it. Author Kevin Maney tried to find the origin of the quote, but has been unable to locate any speeches or documents of Watson's that contain this, nor are

5041-486: Was such that he quit and moved from his familiar surroundings to the relative metropolis of Buffalo . Watson then spent a very brief period selling sewing machines for Wheeler and Wilson. According to son Thomas J. Watson Jr. 's, autobiography: One day my dad went into a roadside saloon to celebrate a sale and had too much to drink. When the bar closed, he found that his entire rig—horse, buggy, and samples—had been stolen. Wheeler and Wilson fired him and dunned him for

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