When IBM ruled

“The B in IBM stands for business, not toys.”

Fred Goetz is 82 now, but he recalls vividly the IBM board’s reaction to his team’s proposal in 1979. For the world’s leading technology company, which was selling refrigerator-sized mainframe computers worth millions and developing shipboard systems for the space program, an affordable home computer for consumers was little more than a frivolous sidelight.

Despite the disdain, “the Dirty Dozen” – Goetz and 11 other engineers in Boca Raton – were ordered by the company’s lame duck CEO to push forward with developing the personal computer. Their work would go far beyond IBM’s early staples of adding machines, punch-card readers and typewriters, yet be far more flexible and user-friendly than the hefty cabinet and tabletop workstations that filled the office space of the day.

Less than two years later, on August 12, 1981, the first IBM PC was unveiled, leading the world into a new era of home-based computing. The invention put an obscure South Florida vacation town on the map as a business center.

And now, though IBM has abandoned the PC business and its presence in Boca has dwindled, its legacy remains in today’s robust South Florida tech sector, which owes its origins to the magnetic pull of what was then the world’s pioneering computer maker.

As International Business Machines celebrates its 100th birthday this month, former Boca Raton employees looked back with affection on their time at the cutting edge. Big Blue started its Boca operations in temporary offices set in snake-rich scrublands, and by the mid-1980s had come to define Boca Raton, with some 10,000 employees in 28 buildings and 4 million square feet of offices and manufacturing space.

Today’s IBM is a $100 billion vendor of services and behind-the-scenes technologies – none of them PCs, an industry now dominated by Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba, Acer and Lenovo, which bought IBM’s PC business in 2004. So when the teams that created IBM’s first PCs gathered in Boca to celebrate the corporate centennial, it was a bittersweet moment.

“We were kind of disappointed that it all disappeared,” Goetz said. “But we really felt good about what we did.”

Early Days

IBM was born in upstate New York in 1911 as CTR, the Computing Tabulating and Recording Co., which specialized in punch cards, commercial scales and clocks. It took the name International Business Machines in 1924, focusing on large calculation and accounting projects, and later went on to invent the first magnetic hard drive in 1956 and the first computer-driven airline reservation system in 1962.

The company created the guidance system computers for the U.S. space program at Cape Canaveral, and Florida became familiar ground. When it sought a new location to develop a line of moderately priced computers, Big Blue set its sights on countryside near the newly opened Florida Atlantic University, land frequented by alligators, armadillos, walking catfish and poisonous snakes.

“They put a guy on the bulldozer with a shotgun because of all the water moccasins,” said IBM retiree Angelo Gasparri, who traveled a dirt road from Fort Lauderdale to get to work. “It was a little rural around here.”

Three years after the Boca branch opened in 1967, FAU approved creation of a college of engineering – a fitting complement to the growing local tech sector.