ABSTRACT
Everybody knows that Thomas Watson, Sr., built IBM into a big computer company and was a business leader. When IBM embarked on designing a computer to be sold in large quantities, it applied hardware largely developed by others—mainly university labs at MIT, Princeton, Rochester, and Pennsylvania. But it was all designed to Watson's original specifications. Watson played a key role in the conceptual history of the computer. Watson's insistence on memory and program thus explains in large measure why there is a computer industry. Because of Watson's specifications of memory and program, the IBM research project of 1937 helped create computer science. Watson very early established foreign branches of IBM, one in France, one in Japan, and so on. IBM actually had little foreign business at the time, and Watson knew perfectly well that he could have handled whatever there was through exporting directly.
