Yorktown Heights In The Good Old Days

YorktownHeights?! Working there was one of my all time dreams! Tell us more about it!

I loved working at Yorktown (Upper New-York State; mainly a research center for IBM). I think that, if I could have worked at the IBM Research I joined in 1983 for my entire life, I would have hated "retiring", because despite my long hours, I never thought of working there as "work".

My job, at least at first, was to make it easier for users of personal computers to get their work done. I did that with telephone consulting, weekly seminars, and the creation of a long series of software packages, many of which accidentally escaped IBM such that you might have encountered them. Only once, in that time, did I build a program that somebody else asked me to build. Over and over again, I discovered needs that IBM Research employees had and built software (often in collaboration with others) to satisfy those needs.

Among them were such varied offerings as The Yorktown PC User's Workbench (one of the first soup to nuts software installations delivered to users on new PC's), FileMan? (which evolved, with SubTree? Plus (STP), into OS/2 and MicroSoft Windows File Manager), HELP (possibly the first tag or intent-based hypermedia markup system and one of the first hypermedia systems to enable distribution of hypertext from network servers to hypermedia browsers; HELP became OS/2 Help Manager, a U.S. Government maintenance document system, and several other products), the E editor (eventually OS/2 enhanced editor and, through a rewrite, SlickEdit), and others systems. In other words, I had a blast.

Later my attention turned to my primary research interest, computer mediated communication, as I operated and enhanced (again in collaboration with others) IBM's global computer conferencing systems. Starting in about 1989, the development focus for conferencing turned to moving Mike Cowleshaw's outstanding Tools/Toolsrun system from VM to local network servers.

But 1989 marks something of a major turning point for IBM Research. It's about that time that Development started to become the big D of the division and R started to become a little R. I never did another day of work in IBM, starting about that time, where I didn't have to find the funding for my work outside the division. I did that very successfully for about ten years, but by then I had even had to move my research and developement team from IBM Research to IBM Global Services. IBM Research was no longer interested in research projects that didn't promise development returns in six to twelve months. That, unfortunately, hasn't changed much since (my significant other retired from IBM Research eight months ago, so I'm still pretty in touch with what's happening there).

It's still a great place to work. There were, and still are, a lot of very smart people there who do interesting things. Many of them are still friends. I don't question, however, that almost none of the software that I built while I was at IBM Research would never have been built at all under the current management system.

Funny how times change. Hope I didn't burst your fantasy.

-- DavisFoulger

Questions

Profitable research projects?

(db) When I approached IBM many years ago, I had a feeling a lot of money was wasted in research projects that would never make a penny. Just about everyone was into research, it seemed. Were any of those research projects profitable?

Lou Gerstner enters

(db) Did Lou Gerstner actually do the clean-up and gear the company towards services?

Partnering with an IBMer

(db) Is it true that in those days, if you approached an IBMer with a project, if he liked it, you could join the company and work on the project? Is that another urban legend?'

Patents

(db) IBM was the company getting the most patents in the world at one point. Right?

How an idea got funding

(db) When you had an idea for a research, how did it work? How would you get the funding? And if the product you worked on got marketed, were you getting a cut of the profits?

Submissions from the outside

(db) I know an IBM division examines projects submitted by persons from the outside. Do they actually really examine projects or is their role purely to give the impression of openness?

OS2 and Windows 3.1

(db) I never understood how the split between IBM and Microsoft happened. Weren't both companies jointly working on OS2? What happened all of a sudden? Why did Microsoft fork to Windows 3.1 and start commercializing it? What was the deal for OS2 between those two companies?

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