He nonetheless landed a job on Wall Street, where he persuaded his bosses to give him $1 million for minicomputers — the cutting edge of computing before personal computers — that could deliver the first instant reports on how business was doing.
Some people say that cognitive computing represents the third era of computing: we went from computers that could tabulate sums (1900s) to programmable systems (1950s), and now to cognitive systems.
The Enigma code-breaker imagined a "universal machine" that could compute, as far back as the war; boxes, now called computers, that could think outside the box.
Smaller computers that could be used by one person had existed since the 1950s.
And, at this year's drill, computers that could see the action.
The firm has designed innovative tablet computers that could compete with Apple's iPad.
In 1973, the company experimented with using computers that could track inventory and make orders.
John von Neumann, Alan Turing and many other visionaries gave us computers that could process information.
Computers that could not talk to each other sometimes lost track of shipments altogether.
That used multiple computers that could fail, and so there you have a distributed system.
IBM's specialty was mainframe computers i.e., expensive medium- to large-scale computers that could process numerical data at great speeds.
