If you have had an item shipped, a prescription filled, or a banking transaction completed recently, a Rochester-designed IBM machine or system very likely enabled the action.

In the 66 years since IBM, or International Business Machines, started operating in Rochester, tech has transitioned from punch cards in desk-sized business machines to quarter-inch microchips with billions of transistors. Ten-thousand character limits grew into petaFLOPs, which grew into gigaFLOPs, then teraFLOPs, then exaFLOPs. IBM has survived through adaptation, an emphasis on end users, and an eye toward the long view.

In many ways, Rochester has been along for the ride. IBM’s iconic blue-glass facility brought brains, diversity, money, massive family picnics, prestige, and civic leaders to the city. When layoffs occured, the city felt them acutely, too.

While IBM has helped push Rochester forward, the products designed and manufactured here have shaped our world. Supercomputers designed and manufactured by IBM Rochester have been used to steward nuclear weapons, forecast weather, further facial recognition capabilities, and develop vaccines for Covid-19.

The beginning

In the 1950s, IBM was looking to build a new manufacturing plant in a midwestern city. The field of eligible cities narrowed to Madison, Wis. and Rochester. The company, according to its archives, selected Rochester for its quality labor force, good schools, moral fiber, utilities infrastructure, and less powerful unions

Photo courtesy History Center of Olmsted County

Initially, IBM Rochester had one focus: manufacturing. The first machine to roll off the production floor of IBM Rochester was an IBM 077 Numeric Collator, a punch card machine developed in the late 1930s.

A development lab opened on the campus in 1961, leading to vertical integration of design and manufacturing. This turned the campus into a kind of human supercomputer, with nodes of experts all working toward one goal. That approach was highlighted with the development and launch of the AS/400 in 1988.

Project Silverlake

When Steve Will, chief architect for the operating system IBMi, arrived as a programmer in 1985, he was put to work on the AS/400 project. Back then, there was an understood dress code for the engineers, a quasi-team uniform, modeled after the IBM Service Corps, who were known for their NASA-esque white shirts and ties.

Bruce Buchardt started in manufacturing that same year, where dress norms trended toward khakis and a polo.

The AS/400 project was code-named “Silverlake.” It aimed to combine two existing systems serving thousands of small and medium business clients. The resulting product was remarkable at the time for its ability to integrate security, storage, and database into a single system. Thousands of clients worldwide, from midsize to large businesses, even Fortune 500 companies, made use of the system over the following years. By July 1991, revenue from the AS/400 had reached roughly $14 billion.

“It was a driving force behind Rochester growing to be as big as it was in terms of the development of the platform. It was designed here, tested here, was built here,” said Will.

The success of the AS/400 continued, and by the early 1990s, IBM Rochester employed more than 8,000 employees — the most it would ever have. IBM has not divulged employee numbers since 2008, when it reported 4,200 employees, but a recent estimate using OSHA data by Post-Bulletin reporter Jeff Kiger puts the current number around 2,500 to 2,800 employees. (IBM did not confirm this number.)

As hardware changed over the years, the AS/400’s operating system, OS/400, continued to work on new machines. Elements of it are still present in the modern IBMi operating system, which is used by banks, pharmacies, and shipping companies.

“If you order something today, online, it's probably going to get shipped by somebody who is using IBMi in the background to figure out where to pick it up, where to put it on the truck, how that truck gets here, etc.” said Will. IBMi was officially launched in 2008, nine months after Will was named chief architect.

The age of supercomputers

While Will worked to shepherd IBM’s clients into the modern age, others in the company were designing and building the fastest computers in the world.

Andy Schram was a program executive responsible for the CORAL program, which included Oak Ridge National Laboratories’ Summit supercomputer and Livermore National Laboratories’ Sierra supercomputer. In 2018, Summit and Sierra were the first and second fastest supercomputers in the world.

Schram was hired in 1979 as a junior engineer; he began working on supercomputers in 2002, when IBM’s research department approached IBM Rochester to design the microprocessor and the interconnect system for supercomputers. Rochester’s vertical integration made the location uniquely qualified, as it had all the skills on one site to do hardware design, software design, and manufacturing. The first supercomputer they developed was called Blue Gene L.

This project made full use of the IBM Rochester facility. According to Buchardt, who worked as a test analyzer on the project, IBM’s tool room even fabricated brand new tools (like a two-headed screwdriver) for specific uses on the project.

“It requires so much deep knowledge that there's not one person that actually could understand, in detail, the entire process from high level design all the way through manufacturing,” said Schram of supercomputers.

Around the same time, a new division in IBM started developing the microprocessor for the XBOX360. They also worked on microprocessors for Sony PlayStation and Nintendo systems between 2005 and 2008.

The microprocessor developed for PlayStation would go on to be used in the Roadrunner supercomputer, built in Rochester for Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico. In 2008, Roadrunner was the first supercomputer to reach one petaflop.

“In the world of supercomputing, it was a major coup for IBM Rochester to design and manufacture the first machine that reached the petaflop,” said Schram.

Manufacturing wind-down

Through much of its life, IBM Rochester manufactured mainframes, PCs, typewriters, printers, and cash registers. As markets changed, however, the campus moved away from manufacturing.

In 2013, for example, IBM informed employees that servers would be assembled in Guadalajara, Mexico. At the Rochester location, employees like Buchardt helped teach their replacements. The company's shift abroad was notable enough that then-candidate Donald Trump touched on the subject during his remarks in Minneapolis on Nov. 6, 2016.

IBM Rochester now focuses on cloud computing, AI services, finance, and patents. In 2018, IBM sold its Rochester campus to real estate development company IRG. This meant the cavernous warehouse and manufacturing spaces of the campus could be used by companies more focused on production. In the past few years, cancer therapeutics company Vyriad, for example, moved into a space on the campus.

The ‘good old days’ were good, said Tory Johnson, IBM Minnesota Senior State Executive, Rochester Senior Location Executive, and VP of Supply Chain Engineering, Systems, but they also came with a thicker bureaucracy and less flexibility. He believes employees are far more entrepreneurial and empowered to make decisions now.

Consolidating IBM’s operations on the east side of the campus has allowed for a renewed spirit of culture and collaboration. Last year, IBM employees volunteered a total of 23,000 hours, according to Johnson.

On May 31, IBM announced its next generation of mainframe systems, the Z16 Artemis — which Rochester helps support. It represents just one more step in the ceaseless march of innovation in tech.

The work at IBM Rochester has always bordered on indecipherable to laypeople, but as tech evolves, the ability for one person to understand it all has gone away entirely.

“We design the computers on computers,” said Schram. “You can't touch them anymore. You can't probe them, you can't measure things necessarily. It's all so small, that you are looking at a computer virtual design of something that some other machine magically produces in a factory with chemicals and UV light, and all sorts of stuff that nobody can really see or touch. But at the end of the day, something pops out and you connect a few wires up to it and it works.”

Bryan Lund is a Rochester-based writer and regular contributor to Med City Beat

Cover photos courtesy History Center of Olmsted County