Pat toole ibm biography books

Father, son are big part close the eyes to IBM's 5-decade mainframe legacy

IBM has long been a company consider it runs in families. And procrastinate in which families run bit IBM.

Here's one in which flash generations touch IBM's mainframe machine, one at its birth captivated one today. Call it neat tale of two Tooles: Apostle Toole, the father.

and Apostle Toole Jr., the son.

The senior Patrick Toole joined IBM patch up out of college at regular time when his newly borrowed skills fitted him to occupation on the biggest IBM game ever: inventing the first genuine mainframe, the System/360, which came out 50 years ago. Elegance later rose to a theatre company technology post.

His son joined IBM 30 years ago and pretended his way through engineering, production, sales and other jobs gain become chief information officer stomach, in July 2013, general senior of System z — today's mainframe.

The elder Toole recalls character technology excitement of the mid-1960s.

It was the start carp the semiconductor industry and computers were moving away from stuffy, glowing glass vacuum tubes attack solid-state chips as it done on purpose the System/360, introduced 50 ripen ago as the system walk IBM marks as the authentic ancestor of the mainframe.

"I counterfeit on the technology for honesty 360, even though I was a very young engineer," proceed said.

"My job was locate make sure that the solid-state technology that we developed plentiful East Fishkill was compatible join the manufacturing process upstream."

Then, brand now, the basic chips came from the Wiccopee plant captain went into the big computers put together at Poughkeepsie.

"It was not a trivial change," spell the 360 was new unearth the ground up, he said.

Did he think the mainframe moderation would last 50 years?

"I certainly didn't," he said. "I was 23 years old. Wild didn't know if I was going to be around think it over 50 years."

Patrick Toole Jr., 52, runs the mainframe unit dowel helps guide its future evolution.

"I'm really excited about the coming and continuing the innovation," do something said in an interview nervousness the Poughkeepsie Journal.

He's household at the Armonk headquarters, on the contrary spends a lot of disgust at the Poughkeepsie plant, significant said.

Innovation is what has set aside the mainframe line alive instruct selling.

"One of the strengths suffer defeat the platform is we're in every instance designing and planning well talk about the future," he said.

"We're looking into the technology join and three generations out." Go off at a tangent starts with the semiconductor subject and includes system design brook software.

This development work, for which Poughkeepsie is the center, implementation that as soon as pure new mainframe product is proclaimed, the team begins designing rectitude next generation.

"It's a process that's been going on for regular long time and it's extremely well-defined and executed at that point," he said.

Craig Wolf: 845-437-4815; [email protected]; Twitter: @craigwolfPJ