PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD With patent lawsuits constantly in the news, you know there's a great deal at stake when a company files for and is granted a patent.
IBM certainly knows this. It has made the acquisition of patents an integral part of the company's DNA. Quite interestingly, this year marks 100 years since its first patent. That patent was granted for an invention related to punched-card tabulation.
The IBM punch card was at the heart of the
company's first patent, issued July 25, 1911. (Source: eWEEK)
IBM's patent statistics are impressive. The company's inventors have received more than 70,000 patents since 1911. And IBM was the first company to be granted as many as 5,000 U.S. patents in a single year.
In 2010, IBM received a record 5,896 U.S. patents. That marked the 18th consecutive year the company topped the list of the world's most inventive companies. Patents issues in 2010 were in areas including analytics, core computing and software technologies, and smart traffic systems and health care systems.
Over the years, some of the patents were for technology or processes that reshaped the IT industry. For example, in 1968, IBM inventor Robert Dennard received a patent for inventing a one-transistor dynamic RAM cell. This cell became the standard for computer memory.
In 1985, a patent was issued for a "microcomputer system with bus control means for peripheral processing devices." The invention paved the way for growth in the IT industry by allowing the use of plug-in subsystems and peripherals like disk drives, video gear, speakers and scanners. In other words, this was the technology for the PC.
Many of the inventions helped in areas outside of IT. For example, IBM inventors Gerd Binning and Heinrich Rohrer received a patent in 1982 for an invention that "can image atomic details as tiny as 1/25th the diameter of a typical atom." This is the technology at the heart of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM). Five years after Binnig and Rohrer built the first STM, they were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics.
For a glimpse at other IBM patents, check out the eWEEK slideshow of 10 important and interesting patents. The slideshow can be found here.
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