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technology. His 1948 work, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” developed his binary system, which became the basis of modern telecommunications and computing. It has been called the Magna Carta of the information age.
    During World War II, Bush turned down an application to the NDRC for funding a project on digital computers from Norbert Wiener, a leading mathematician at MIT, for fear that it would divert resources from the war effort for a long-term project. For the same reason, Bush also refused to fund the electric numerical integrator and calculator (ENIAC), which was funded instead by the army.
    The role of the US military in nurturing information technology began in the 1930s, when the army needed a computer capable of calculating artillery-firing tables. The Army’s Aberdeen Ballistics Research Laboratory provided funding for a team at Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering led by John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. Inspired by theoretical work done earlier by Iowa State’s John V. Atanasoff, the Pennsylvania team in 1946 built the first all-purpose electronic computer, ENIAC. The army was joined in its sponsorship of the computer industry by the Office of Naval Research, NACA, and the Census Bureau, with its perennial interest in rapid data processing. 22
    The initiative then shifted back to Remington Rand and IBM. In 1950, Remington Rand acquired the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, along with its contract with the US Census Bureau. Then, in 1952, Remington Rand acquired another company, Engineering Associates, formed by veterans of work done for the navy on the use of computers in cryptology.
    Meanwhile, in 1950, the head of IBM, Thomas Watson Sr., boasted that a single IBM computer on display in New York could “solve all the important scientific problems in the world involving scientific calculations.” 23 Work done by IBM for the attempt of the US and Canadian governments to build a Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) air defense against Soviet missiles for North America led to major breakthroughs. By the mid-1950s, IBM was responsible for two-thirds of all computer sales and, after it introduced its System 360 in 1960, it dominated the mainframe computer industry for a generation.
    IBM is so important in the history of modern computer technology that we decide to follow a trail to learn more about the company.
    “NOTHING IN THE WORLD WILL EVER STOP IT”: THE RISE OF IBM
    In January 1926, Thomas Watson Sr., the founding president of IBM, predicted to the star salesmen at his One Hundred Percent Club convention: “This business has a future for your sons and grandsons and your great-grandsons, because it is going on forever. Nothing in the world will ever stop it. The IBM is not merely an organization of men; it is an institution that will go on forever.” 24 To date his prediction has been borne out.
    In its centennial year of 2011, IBM ranked eighteenth on Fortune ’s list of America’s biggest companies and the seventh most profitable, and fifty-second on the list of the Fortune Global 500. IBM was ranked number one in information technology services. In the same year, IBM ranked twelfth out of fifty on a list of the world’s most admired companies, and number one in information technology (IT) services. 25 The previous year, the company had filed eighteen thousand patents—more than any company in the world—and spent $24 billion on R&D. Among its projects were Smart Planet, a program to use computer networking to ease traffic and help power grids.
    In 1997, an IBM computer, Deep Blue, defeated the chess champion Garry Kasparov at chess. In February 2011, Ken Jennings, the record-holding champion, and another contestant, Brad Rutter, battled Watson on the American television quiz show Jeopardy . Watson was a computer capable of understanding questions in natural language and developed by IBM’s DeepQA project, headed by David Ferrucci. Watson defeated its