If You Focus On Possibilities You’ll Have More Opportunities.
Eniac was one of the first computers to list – electronic circuits, which made for lightning fast calculations. At first, Thomas J. Watson, the former chairman of IBM, saw no use for it. He said,” I reached to Eniac the way some people probably reacted to the Wright brothers’ airplane. It didn’t move me at all…. I couldn’t see this gigantic, costly, unreliable device as a piece of business equipment.”
A few weeks later, he and his father wandered into a research office as IBM and saw engineer with a high – speed punch- card medicine hooked up to a black box. When asked what he was doing, he said, “Multiplying with radio tubes.” The machine was tabulating payroll at one tenth the time it took the standard punch card machine to do so. Watson recalls, “That impressed me as though somebody had hit me on the head with a hammer.” He said, Dad, we should put this thing on the market! Even if we only sell eight or ten, we’ll be able to advertise the fact that we have the world’s first commercial electronic calculator.”
That’s how IBM got into electronics. Within a year, they had electronic circuits that both multiplied and divided, and at that point, electronic circuits that both multiplied and divided, and at that point, electronic calculators become truly useful. Thousands of the IBM 604 were sold.
What wasn’t yet obvious to Thomas Watson was obvious to the engineer working In the research department. Always keep your eyes and ears open; you never know what you might discover. Look for the possibilities around you.
