IBM’s Executive Terminal Was a War Room for Top Managers

It seems to me that every item in the
Computer History Museum’s collection has a biography of sorts—a life before CHM, a tale about how it came to us, and a life within the museum. The chapters of that biography include the uses made of it, and the historical and interpretive stories it can be made to tell. This then is a biography of one item that recently entered the museum’s collection—an early Memorex videotape containing a recording from 1968—and the historical discovery it has afforded.

Our biography begins in May 2020, with an email. Debra Dunlop, a
dean at New England College, wrote to the museum about a large collection of documents, audiovisual materials, and a rare computer, a Xerox Star, in New Hampshire. These were the professional papers of Debra’s father, Robert Dunlop, and she knew how dearly he valued the collection. She was helping her father move to an assisted living facility, and she had to make a plan for this extensive collection. What did the museum think?

Industrial psychologist Robert Dunlop spent his career at high-tech companies, including IBM, RCA, and Xerox.Computer History Museum

For me, the Dunlop collection was a light in the darkness. It was still early days in the pandemic, and the death toll in the United States from Covid-19 was nearing 100,000, with a vaccine shot for me still months in the future. I was working from home in Massachusetts but I was nervous because the museum—like all places that depend in part on ticket sales—faced strong financial pressures, and I didn’t know how long it could go on with its doors closed. The Dunlop collection sounded interesting. Robert Dunlop had been an industrial psychologist who spent his career at large, high-technology U.S. firms—first IBM, then RCA, and finally Xerox. The collection wasn’t far away, and perhaps there was a way I could safely go and have a look.

I learned more about Robert Dunlop’s career from Debra. She and her family moved the collection to a garage where, after we let it sit for a week, we felt it would be safe for me to review the materials alone, wearing a mask, with the garage doors open.

After the visit, I discussed what I had seen with my colleagues, and we agreed that I would return and select, pack, and ship out a substantial portion of it. Debra and her family very kindly made a financial donation to the museum to help with the shipping expenses in that difficult time for CHM. And as my colleagues and I would eventually discover, Dunlop’s collection offered an extraordinary glimpse into a transformative time in advanced computing, and a fascinating project that had been wholly unknown to the history of computing until now.

A Discovery

In May 2020, the author visited Dunlop’s home to go through documents, photos, and audiovisual recordings related to his work. Much of the material now resides at the Computer History Museum.David C. Brock

As I went through the collection in that New Hampshire garage, one item intrigued me. It was an early video recording, made in 1968, that clearly had great meaning for Robert Dunlop. The 1-inch format tape on an open reel had been carefully packaged and included an explanatory note by Dunlop taped to the outside, along with a longer letter from him tucked inside. Both notes told of an inventive computer system at IBM headquarters that I’d never heard of. According to the notes, a demo of the system was captured on the long obsolete video.

In 1995, when Dunlop wrote the notes, he had despaired of finding any working equipment to recover the recording. As the tape rested in my hands, I wondered the same thing—should I even collect this if it’s impossible to watch? But then I thought, “Perhaps we can figure something out. And if not us, maybe something could happen in the future.” I decided to take my chances and collect it.

To recover the recording from the obsolete tape, the museum turned to George Blood LP, a company that specializes in archival audio and video. Penny Ahlstrand

The Dunlop collection started its new life in the museum, carefully rehoused into archival storage boxes and added to our backlog for archival processing. In 2023, a grant to the museum from the
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation presented an opportunity to digitize some of the audiovisual materials in our collection. When I was consulted about priorities, one of the items I selected was Dunlop’s 1968 video recording. Could we give it a try?

Massimo Petrozzi, CHM’s Director of Archives and Digital Initiatives, reached out to his networks to see if there was someone who could help. A contact in Europe pointed back to the States, to George Blood and his firm George Blood LP outside of Philadelphia. The company is a major provider of audio and moving-picture preservation services, boasting an enormous collection of equipment—including, as it happens, an Ampex video unit capable of recovering video from Dunlop’s tape, which Blood called a “very early technology.” Blood and his colleagues made painstaking adjustments and experiments and were finally able to recover and digitize Dunlop’s silent video, fulfilling Robert Dunlop’s long hopes. Sadly, Dunlop did not live to see his recording again. He died in July 2020.

A Competing Vision of Computing

The recording reveals a story as interesting as it is seemingly forgotten.

You may already be aware of the “Mother of All Demos” presented by Doug Engelbart and the members of his Stanford Research Institute center at the close of 1968. This presentation, with Engelbart on stage at a major computing conference in San Francisco, displayed the features and capabilities of his group’s “oN-Line System,” known as NLS. The system included many elements that were extraordinarily novel, even for the assembled computing professionals: networked computers, video conferencing, graphical interfaces, hypertext, collaborative word processing, and even a new input device, the computer mouse.

This remarkable 1968 demonstration of the NLS was, much to our benefit, recorded on videotape. Although relatively early in video technology, the quality of the surviving recording is excellent and readily available online today.

The NLS was driven by a particular vision for the future use and practice of computing: a vision that centered on the notion of alliance. In this vision, individuals would join together into teams and organizations, directly using new computing tools and approaches for creating and using knowledge, and in doing so, “augmenting human intellect” to better solve complex problems.

Dunlop’s video recording, it turned out, also contained a demonstration of another advanced computing system that also took place in 1968. This second demo occurred on the East Coast, at IBM’s corporate headquarters in Armonk, N.Y., and was motivated by a far different—perhaps one could go so far as to say an opposite—vision for the future of computing. This vision centered not on alliance, but rather on the concept of rank. The system was known as the IBM Corporate Headquarters Information Center, and it was the culmination of Dunlop’s experiments with executive-computer interaction at the company.

Dunlop’s career at IBM across the 1960s coincided with a truly remarkable period of growth for the firm. From 1964—the year IBM announced its
new System/360 line of digital computers—to 1970, the firm’s headcount and revenues both doubled.

To contend with this extraordinary growth, Dunlop worked on what he and others there called “management information systems”—computer systems serving the informational needs of IBM managers.

As Dunlop noted in an unpublished talk, IBM managers were increasingly embracing information processing in the form of the company’s own timesharing computer products. Several internal IBM systems gave users remote access to timesharing computers, with modified electric typewriters serving as the user “terminals.” A sophisticated messaging system allowed employees to send one another telegram-like messages from one terminal to another, at the rate of 25,000 messages per day. A mathematical utility, QUIKTRAN, let users perform simple as well as sophisticated calculations from their terminals. There was a proliferation of systems for storing documents and formatting them in complex ways, with a single computer supporting up to 40 typewriter terminal users. Lastly, there were what today we would call database systems, containing information about the business and the organization, with a query language and financial models, again available from the users’ typewriter terminals.

IBM’s Executive War Room

As these systems were increasingly adopted by what Dunlop called “operational and middle managers,” he led a series of projects to see if IBM could create terminals and management information systems that could be productively used by IBM’s “top executives.” The systems would allow the executives to make strategic decisions for the company in new ways afforded by the computer. His initial efforts all failed.

First, Dunlop experimented with providing high-ranking executives—VPs and the like— with typewriter terminals directly linked to real-time data, financial models, and summary documents about the firm. The terminals went untouched, quickly migrating to the desks of the executives’ secretaries.

Dunlop then tried using IBM’s new CRT-based terminal, the 2250, with a simplified keypad for input. The result was unchanged. Through interviews and surveys, he concluded that the failure was due to the executives’ “self-role concept.” They held themselves to be “very high status” decision-makers who got information from subordinates; any direct use of a typewriter or keyboard would “demean” them.

From his failed experiments, Dunlop concluded that the state-of-the-art in computing technology was inadequate for creating a terminal-based management system for top management. However, those same top managers had noticed that middle managers around the firm had established “war rooms,” in which staff integrated information from all the various terminal-based systems: messaging, text, and database. At IBM corporate headquarters, the top executives wanted a war room of their own.

This desire led Dunlop and others to create the IBM Headquarters Information Center. Here, “information specialists” would respond to inquiries by high-ranking executives. The specialists had access to messaging, text, database, and financial modeling systems accessed through typewriter and CRT terminals, as well as an array of printed materials, microform holdings, and audiovisual materials. In short, the information center was a reference library, staffed with reference librarians, of the sort that would become commonplace in the 1980s.

An old recording with typed notes from Dunlop turned out to contain a previously unknown 1968 demonstration of an IBM system called the Executive Terminal. Penny Ahlstrand

With the new IBM Headquarters Information Center in place, Dunlop saw the opportunity to run another experiment in 1967-68, which he called the “Executive Terminal.” The lead information specialist in the information center would sit at a video-mixing and control console, equipped with a video camera, microphone, and even lighting. Meanwhile, the executive user would be in their office with their Executive Terminal, a modified television set with an audio and video connection to the console in the information center.

The executive pressed a button to summon the information specialist and their live video image to the screen. Remaining unseen, the executive could then place an inquiry. The information specialist would direct other staff in the information center to gather the appropriate information to answer the request: Models were run on CRT terminals, documents and data were gathered on typewriter terminals, microform could be loaded into a video reader, paper documents could be placed on a video capture unit. Once the results were assembled, the information specialist conveyed all this information to the executive, cutting from one video feed to another, guided by the executive’s interest and direction.

Dunlop’s 1968 video demonstration of the Executive Terminal and the Information Center proceeds in three acts.

The first 10 minutes of the video show the information specialist and other staff responding to an executive’s request, finding and preparing all the materials for video presentation, using the typewriter and CRT terminals, and even engaging in video conferencing with another employee:

The next five minutes show the executive using the Executive Terminal to receive the results and directing the display and flow of the information:

The final few minutes show the information specialist working on an IBM 2260 video computer terminal, at the time still a novelty that was used for database and model access:

Restoring History

It’s unclear what ultimately became of IBM’s Executive Terminal and the Information Center, as they appear to have left little to no historical traces beyond a few documents—including the unpublished talk—some photographs, and Dunlop’s 1968 video recording.

With Engelbart’s and Dunlop’s 1968 demo videos, we now have a remarkable and contrasting snapshot of two very different directions in advanced computing. Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos showed how advanced computing could create a shared, collaborative environment of allied individuals, all direct users of the same system, befitting of a laboratory of computer enthusiasts in Menlo Park, Calif. Dunlop’s Executive Terminal demo showed how many of these same advanced technologies could be directed along another path, that of a strictly hierarchical organization, highly attuned to rank and defined roles and specialties. While these were very different and perhaps opposing directions, they shared a common commitment to the use of advanced computing for organizing and analyzing information, and taking action.

In the Information Center at IBM Headquarters, in Armonk, N.Y., information specialists were on call to answer questions from users.The Dunlop Collection

Engelbart held that his system was for the “augmentation of the human intellect,” so that users might better address complex problems. For Dunlop, the Executive Terminal was an answer to his question, “Can we make better decisions, at higher levels, through better information processes?”

There are echoes of Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos around us every day—the hyperlinks of the Web, the scuttling of computer mice on desktops, the editing of online documents, and more. But just as evident are the echoes of Dunlop’s Executive Terminal demo, such as the video conferencing and screen-sharing practices so familiar in Zooms, Teams, and Meets today.

The Computer History Museum is pleased to make public the entire video recording of Robert Dunlop’s 1968 demonstration, and with its release, to restore a forgotten chapter in the history of computing.

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on the blog of the Computer History Museum.