My dear Watson, IBM Hits 100!

You knew where you were instantly this morning.

In an old IBM building (now the Don Estridge High Tech Middle School) with a display of early putty-colored PCs, people in dark suits, the usual public officials and my favorite group: an army of white-haired guys who grew up wearing pocket protectors but who were now retirees, milling around in tropical shirts and khakis, greeting old colleagues.

It is IBM’s 100^th birthday June 15 and the party is already starting here, in Boca Raton, home of the first PC when IBM was big in Boca—and changed the face of the city forever.

Although IBM’s presence is much reduced these days, you could still feel the company vibe in the room. The power point presentation started with vintage International Business Machine pictures, then the era of the punch card, the bar code, the iconic 360 operating system (and its ties to the Apollo space mission) and always, the lanky late Don Estridge, former Boca IBM-er who invented the PC in a top secret building on the IBM campus.

A former employee said this morning as she stirred her coffee that the PC was actually invented not far from where we were standing.

“They called it Building 51,” she whispered. “No one could even get into that building.”

Naturally I started thinking of Area 51 in Roswell, New Mexico, and its cache of space aliens and determined that IBM probably wasn’t that much of a stretch, after all. I mean, think of the brainpower that contributed to the technology launched here. All these guys in flowered shirts? Not your average retiree. It was these guys, and the ones who carry on now, who have given us instant airplane reservations and communication satellites and voice recognition and advanced medical analytics, not to mention a smart computer named Watson who beat the pants off its human competition in a famous game of “Jeopardy.”

It’s not often these days that you associate Boca Raton with this kind of advanced and innovative technology.  But it’s been here, in our town’s DNA, for 45 years. Which conjures up the classic IBM slogan, which was, simply, “THINK.”

I may add the word “WONDER” to that one.