Father, Son & Co.

by Thomas J. Watson

  I have always looked to the day of my promotion to President of IBM as a day of complete fulfillment for me. Of course I will be happy but I will not have the sense of fulfillment I want until I see in your face and your eyes that my work and accomplishments are making you happy. No son ever believed more deeply in a father than I believe in you.

  With love,

  Tom

  As it turned out, the next six months were sheer utter hell. IBM had just passed the quarter-billion-dollar-a-year mark, and there was too much to do, too many decisions to be made. I was working frantically, calling on important customers, pushing into electronics, and trying to stop the antitrust case before it did any real damage. I was also spending a lot of time outside IBM on the Boy Scouts and a whole range of other public service jobs. My new position included a lot of ceremonial responsibilities—giving speeches at conventions and visiting offices all over the country to hold “family dinners,” as Dad called them, with the people who worked there.

  Administrative duties tied up too much of my time. For example, the wages of everybody in the company had to be raised, partly because of inflation and partly because Dad was aware that labor unions were winning big pay increases in other industries. Any other company would have simply announced a general raise from headquarters. But that was not Dad’s way. He thought declaring a general pay increase would undermine the relationships of individual workers and their managers, and give unions an opening by making employees receptive to the idea of collective bargaining. So every raise at IBM had to be presented as an individual ment increase, awarded to each employee by his boss. Instead of telling a department of twenty people that they were all getting a raise, their manager had to have twenty separate interviews. He’d tell each person the same thing: “You’ve done a good job, here’s your raise.” When we gave a general increase, tens of thousands of these interviews had to be coordinated all over the company, and business would just about grind to a halt. The employees knew full well what we were doing, of course—it was one of the times when IBM probably reminded some of them of the rituals of life in the army.

  The frustrations of working with Dad made me pretty demanding of other people. When I went out to inspect a sales office, I was not by any means a benevolent patsy passing through and saying everything was rosy. Instead I’d be smarting from all the anger inside me, and I’d pass a bit of it along. But usually only a bit. I knew that I was likely to see the people at a given office only once every two or three years. So I held myself back, for the practical reason that if I made them too sore, the hard feelings would just stay out there and fester and hurt the business. I often ended up carrying my frustration home with me, where my wife and children would bear the brunt. By now Olive and I had Tom, Jeannette, Olive, and Cindy, ranging in ages from eight down to two. Olive would spend the entire day working with them and she’d have them all shined up and ready to greet me when I came home. I’d come in the door and say, “That child’s sock isn’t pulled up. That child’s hair isn’t combed. What are these boxes doing here in the hall? They should have been mailed.” It was the same demanding IBM attitude, and it was very hard on them all.

  I don’t think my father realized how far he was pushing me. There were times when I wondered if I was going to have a nervous breakdown. That summer one of the managers in our typewriter division died in California. He was a fairly senior guy, married to a woman who had a vindictive personality. For some reason she had the idea that he had been unfairly treated by IBM, and when he died she told somebody she was going to sue the company because his heart had failed from lifting heavy typewriters. When I heard that, I thought it would be important to show some respect by being at his funeral. In those days that meant a nine-hour flight on a propeller-driven airliner called a Constellation. Just as I was leaving for the airport, Dad called me in and we had a terrible argument. Finally I said, “I can’t talk to you anymore. I have an airplane to catch.” And I walked out.

  Dad went down and got in his limousine and somehow beat me to the airport. Wiz Miller, the head of the typewriter division, was traveling with me, and when we got to La Guardia field and started walking out to the airplane on the tarmac, I saw my father. He was a very old man then, seventy-eight, and I remember him painfully making his way out from the shadows under the terminal building where his car was parked. I thought he was playing his age for all it was worth. He slowly came up to me across that tarmac, and with a lot of people standing around watching this curious scene, he reached out his gnarled hand and took my arm. I completely lost my temper. “God damn you, old man! Can’t you ever leave me alone?” I said. I didn’t strike him, but I ripped my arm away with great vigor, turned my back, and went up into the plane.

  That flight was the longest nine hours I ever spent in my life. I was beside myself, terrified that he’d be dead before I could talk to him again, and that I was going to have to live the rest of my life with the knowledge that I’d cursed my father. When we landed I couldn’t wait to get to a phone to tell him how sorry I was.

  That fight passed, like all our other fights, but it shook me up badly. I think it was the first time I ever really understood that my father might die. On some level I started to realize I could no longer afford to act like an adolescent. I took my family on vacation that fall; even though I’d been president for less than a year, we all needed the time off. We spent a quiet two weeks in a wood frame house on Fishers Island off the Connecticut coast. I played with my son and daughters and thought a lot about Dad. Then I took another week sailing down the eastern seaboard with Williams and Learson and some of the other executives I’d come to count on. That gave me even more time to sort things out. Finally, on a train trip a few days after we docked, I took out a yellow pad and wrote down the affection and tenderness I felt for the old man.

  Dear Dad,

  I’ve been thinking about this letter ever since I started for the Chesapeake. On that sail down with the IBM boys I began to think of our 38 years together. My main theme seemed to be to realize again and again how very wonderful, fair, and understanding you have always been to me. I have always realized this but it becomes more clear when I have a son of my own to work with. I only hope that he may think of me when he’s grown the way I think of you. Of course, I hope he won’t argue and defy me as often as I have you because I know how painful that can be to a father.

  I so well remember the problems I gave you in the Short Hills School when you were on that board and I returned to the school when I was at Carteret and got in a mud fight that was reported to the board. You were patient—I am afraid I wouldn’t have been.

  Then I’ve thought of your constant problem with me and my marks and your ability never to lose your temper about my schoolwork.

  I remember so well the morning you and I started out from Camden with the avowed purpose of finding a college which would accept me. I’m so glad Brown did. Then the flying problem and all the way through our relationship—no forbidding—just reasoning. I pray that I may do it the same way with Tom.

  I’m disappointed that I haven’t been a better son in countless ways. You and Mother have always set me such a sterling example but I’m still pitching and I always wanted to make you both proud.

  Every detail of our moments together flood in on me and have for the past three weeks like a pleasant cloud. We’ve had our battles and I soberly believe that in 90 cases out of 100 you were right and in the other ten a better son would have held his tongue.

  I’ve written you a dozen times, Dad, and said that I would do better, but somehow I’ve felt different ever since I went south. I want so to have you satisfied.

  What I’m trying to say is that I love and respect you deeply and want to have a chance to try again to show you. The company is your shadow and health and I hope that I can help keep it that way. I want your direction and advice in the business as I have never wanted it before and would like to spend most of my time with you while you are in, if we can work i
t out.

  This letter probably isn’t conveying what I feel in my heart but I wanted to try anyway.

  What I mean essentially is that no one could have done a better or more sympathetic job of being parents than you and Mother and now I’m going to try harder than ever to make you proud.

  Love,

  Tom

  I am very glad I wrote that letter, because I think it was the happiest moment I ever gave my father.

  Dear Tom

  After reading your letter my heart is so filled with joy I cannot think of anything else, so I am going home and let Mother read it and we will have a quiet and happy time filled with kindest thoughts and prayers for your happiness and usefulness to your family and the Watson clan as a whole and I know we can help you and you can help us.

  I just can’t write any more today, but you can imagine and realize what is in my heart and will fill Mother’s heart as soon as I reach home. May God bless and keep you and help me to be a better father to you and Olive.

  With a heart filled with love,

  Dad

  The letter didn’t end our fighting, but some of the bitterness went out of it on both sides.

  One day in the early 1950s I stopped off in Washington to change planes and Red LaMotte, who was then in charge of our Washington office, came to see me at the airport. “Tommy,” he said in his casual way, “the guys at Remington Rand have one of those UNIVAC machines at the Census Bureau now, and soon they’ll have another. People are excited about it. They’ve shoved a couple of our tabulators off to the side to make room.” I knew all about the UNIVAC, of course, but the Census Bureau was where punch-card machines got their start back in the 1880s, and it had always been IBM’s backyard. I thought, “My God, here we are trying to build Defense Calculators, while UNIVAC is smart enough to start taking all the civilian business away!” I was terrified.

  I came back to New York in the late afternoon and called a meeting that stretched long into the night. There wasn’t a single solitary soul in IBM who grasped even a hundredth of the potential the computer had. We couldn’t visualize it. But the one thing we could understand was that we were losing business. Some of our engineers already had a fledgling effort under way to design a computer for commercial applications. We decided to turn this into a major push to counter univac. Two and a half years later this product would finally come out as the IBM 702, but the name it had while it was still in the lab was the Tape Processing Machine. It was obvious to everyone that we were finally making major strides away from my father’s beloved punch cards.

  Now we had two major computer projects running side by side. We had teams of engineers working three shifts, around the clock, and every Monday morning I’d ignore all my other responsibilities until I’d spent a few hours with the project managers and pressed them on how we were doing. People at IBM invented the term “panic mode” to describe the way we worked: there were moments when I thought we were all on board the Titanic. One morning in 1952 McDowell came to me with a new analysis of what the Defense Calculator was going to cost. “You’re not going to like this,” he said. It turned out that the price we’d been quoting to customers was too low—by half. The machine we thought would cost $8,000 a month was actually going to cost somewhere between $12,000 and $18,000. We had no choice but to go around and let the customers know. To my total amazement, we managed to hang on to as many orders as we’d started with. That was when I felt a real Eureka! Clearly we’d tapped a new and powerful source of demand. Customers wanted computers so badly that we could double the price and still not drive people away.

  We knew UNIVAC was years ahead of us. Worse still, Remington Rand seemed to be making all the right moves. On election night 1952, as Dwight Eisenhower was beating Adlai Stevenson, a UNIVAC appeared on CBS. The network had agreed to use the computer for projecting election results. So millions of people were introduced to the UNIVAC by Edward R. Murrow, Eric Sevareid, and Walter Cronkite, who called it “that marvelous electronic brain.” It performed flawlessly—so well that the people running it didn’t believe what it told them. All the preelection polls had predicted a close race, but on the basis of a tiny fraction of the returns, the UNIVAC said Eisenhower was going to win by a substantial margin. That made the Remington Rand people so nervous that they disconnected a part of the UNIVAC’S memory to bring its prediction in line with the polls. But the machine was right, and at the end of the evening an engineer came on screen and sheepishly admitted what he’d done. Remington Rand’s machine became so famous that when our first computer came out, we found it being referred to as “IBM’s UNIVAC.”

  The Defense Calculator, or the IBM 701 as it was officially called, came off the production line in December 1952. In some ways it was different from any computer that had ever been built. We’d thought of it as a product, not a laboratory device, right from the start. So in spite of its enormous complexity we built it in the factory, not the engineering lab. It also looked different from other computers because we’d designed it to be easy to ship and install. Other machines consisted of oversize racks and panels that were to be delivered in pieces and painstakingly assembled in the customer’s office. The UNIVAC had a main cabinet about the size of a small truck. But the 701 was made up of separate modules, each roughly the size of a large refrigerator, that could fit onto ordinary freight elevators. Our engineers could uncrate the units, cable them together, and have them doing useful work in three days. Any other machine took a minimum of a week.

  Dad wanted to launch the 701 with all the usual IBM fanfare, in part because we needed to divert attention from UNIVAC. So we shipped the first 701 to New York, installed it on the ground floor of headquarters, and got ready for a big dedication. To make room for the new machine we dismantled the SSEC—Dad’s giant calculator-to-end-all-calculators was only five years old but already obsolete, thanks to the rapid progress of electronics. The ceremony was held in April, and one hundred fifty of the top scientists and leaders of American business showed up, including William Shockley, the inventor of the transistor, John von Neumann, the great computer theorist, General David Sarnoff, the head of RCA, and the heads of AT&T and General Electric. The guest of honor was J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant physicist who led the scientific team that built the first atom bomb. He gave a speech calling the 701 “a tribute to the mind’s high splendor,” and in our press releases we bragged that the 701 would “shatter the time barrier confronting technicians working on vital defense projects.”

  Our visitors were impressed with the new computer, and newspapers all over the country picked up the story. But the noisiest reaction came from the big customers who had been pushing us for years to start building computers. Now that we’d delivered the 701 for scientific use, they wanted us to announce the computer we were designing for businesses. “Stop fiddling around,” said my Time Inc. friend Roy Larsen. “Show us what you’ve got so we can decide whether to buy a UNIVAC” Even at this late date some of our punch-card executives were still insisting that computers would never be economical, but the fact that we had customers waiting helped me to override their objections. We announced the IBM 702 in September, and in the space of eight months we had orders for fifty of them.

  Meanwhile I turned my attention to the most important sale of my career. In the 1930s Dad had been able to boost IBM into the top echelon of corporations by supplying punch-card machines for Social Security and the New Deal. There were no such massive social programs under Truman or Eisenhower for us to tap into. It was the Cold War that helped IBM make itself the king of the computer business. After the Russians exploded their first atom bomb in 1949, the Air Force decided that America needed a sophisticated air defense system. They also decided this should incorporate computers—a very bold idea for the time, because computers were still little more than experiments. The government gave a contract to MIT, and some of the country’s best engineers there drew up plans for a vast computer-and-radar network which was supposed to blanket the
United States, operate around the clock, and calculate the location, course, and speed of any incoming bomber. The military name for this system was Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, or SAGE. Air defense until then consisted of a few scattered radar stations, where observers did calculations on slide rules and then plotted flight paths by hand. The faster airplanes became, the harder they were to track. An air defense commander might get redundant messages from two or three different radar operators who each thought he had spotted something. The idea of SAGE was to avoid confusion. The commander could use it to monitor his entire region and transmit orders to his interceptors and antiaircraft batteries.

  The MIT engineer responsible for procuring the SAGE computers was Jay Forrester, an austere man about my age who was driven by a belief that computers could be made to do more than anyone thought. In the summer of 1952 he was traveling around the industry visiting the five companies in the running—RCA, Raytheon, Remington Rand, Sylvania, and IBM—and everybody was pulling out the stops. RCA and Sylvania trotted him through their huge vacuum tube factories that were supplying everyone in the industry. Remington Rand showed off the UNIVAC and brought in as their spokesman the famous general, Leslie Groves. During the war Groves had been the boss of the Manhattan Project, which built the atom bomb.

  I tried not to worry about Groves or the other competitors; I just let IBM speak for itself. I took Forrester to see our plants and introduced him to our most gifted people. He was under extreme pressure to get the system into production as soon as possible, and I think what impressed him was the fact that we were already building computers in a factory. We won a small contract for the first stage of the project, to build prototype computers in conjunction with MIT.

  To make SAGE possible the computers had to work in a way computers had never worked before. In those days computing was typically done in what was called batch mode. This meant that you would collect your data first, feed it into the machine second, then sit back for a little while until the answer came out. You could think of the batch processor as a high diver at a circus—each performance involves a lengthy drum roll in preparation, a very fast dive, and then a splash. But the SAGE system was supposed to keep track of a large air defense picture that was changing every instant. That meant it had to take a constant stream of new radar information and digest it continually in what is called “real time.” So a SAGE computer was more like a juggler who has to keep a half dozen balls in the air, constantly throwing aside old balls as his assistants toss him new ones from every direction. As if real-time computing were not enough of a technical challenge, the Air Force also wanted the system to be absolutely reliable. In those days it was considered an accomplishment if someone could build a computer that would work a full eight-hour day without failing. But SAGE was supposed to operate flawlessly around the clock, year in and year out.