IBM is one of the oldest technology companies in the world, with a raft of innovations to its credit, including mainframe computing, computer-programming languages, and AI-powered tools. But ask an ordinary person under the age of 40 what exactly IBM does (or did), and the responses will be vague at best. "Something to do with computers, right?" was the best the Gen Zers I queried could come up with. If a Millennial knows anything about IBM, it's Watson, the company's prototype AI system that prevailed on Jeopardy in 2011. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. In the chronicles of garage entrepreneurship, however, IBM retains a legendary place--as a flat-footed behemoth.

Generations of computing professionals may remember Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., as the author of the seminal text on system engineering, The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineeringa and his essays such as No Silver Bullet--Essence and Accident in Software Engineering.b Those who worked with Brooks, winner of the 1999 ACM A.M. Turing Award "for landmark contributions to computer architecture, operating systems, and software engineering," may also remember him as the lead designer of IBM's System/360, as an innovator in graphics and virtual reality, and as the founder of the University of North Carolina's computer science department. Brooks was born on April 19, 1931, in Greenville, North Carolina. He received his A.B. in Physics from Duke University in 1953. As a freshman, he saw an article in the January 23, 1950 issue of Time Magazine entitled "The Thinking Machine" that sparked his interest in computing.

We have been hearing a lot lately on the topic of American greatness, where it went, and how to reclaim it. But greatness is complicated, and our ideas of what is great and what is not have changed over time. In this column, I ask what the history of one mighty corporation--IBM--can tell us about the rise and fall of a particular kind of American greatness. Decade after decade, IBM has been one of the world's largest, most profitable, and most admired companies. Of all American businesses, only General Electric, Apple, Microsoft, and Exxon-Mobile have generated more wealth.a Despite recent troubles, it has been ranked in the 2010s as the number one company for leaders (Fortune), the greenest company (Newsweek), the second most valuable global brand (Interbrand), the second most respected company (Barron's) and the fifth most admired (Fortune). IBM technical contributions to computing are second to none. Its researchers won six Turing awards and, more startling, four Nobel prizes. Its engineers produced the first hard disk drive, the first floppy disk drive, the first architecture implemented over a range of diverse but compatible machines, the first widely used high-level programming language, the relational database, the first scientific supercomputer, the first RISC designs, and the first DRAM chip. As recently as 2014, IBM ranked ahead of its old adversary Microsoft on Fortune's lists of the largest U.S. companies (20th place) and of the firms most admired by managers (16th place). In ways good and bad, IBM has been at the forefront of changes in American business and in America's relationships with the world.