Big blues

Lots of stories popped today about IBM's 100th anniversary. Yes, they've been THINK-ing for a century now, and currently IBM looks pretty good for another hundred years or so. The company ran into a very rough patch in the 1990s, but a determined CEO named Lou Gerstner dug them out of the hole.

Many stories bragged about IBM's Watson triumph on Jeopardy. As the faux tweets noted, I'm completely gassed on Watson stories. But the publicity was certainly worth the processing units for Big Blue.

And the stories taught me a bit about IBM's iconic founders, the Watson father-and-son team who lent their name to the know-it-all gizmo. Seems that Daddy Watson ran into more than a few problems with the feds, who always nursed an antitrust grudge against the company. With so many players in the computer biz nowadays, though, the antitrust ruckus seems to have subsided.

Maybe IBM threatened the government with the wrath of the cybernetic Watson.