IBM 610 workstation computer 3373

Anne & Lynn Wheeler

I visited a DC-3 at an airshow and it was very hot and stuffy inside. I don't know how it was ventilated while in flight, although the air presumably is much cooler. I think their ceiling was about 10,000 feet if they even flew that high. I'm not sure how high a plane could go without pressurization.

IBM's president, Tom Watson Jr, was an avid flyer. I believe IBM had a corporate DC-3 which Watson flew himself to meetings and the like. Probably not much fun for his executives who had to go along.

It was a chance meeting between an IBM vice president and the president of American Airlines on an airplane flight that led to the development of SABRE.

In another IBM memoir, the writer (the first woman VP) didn't think much of the train rides to-from Endicott, calling the railroad "the weary Erie". I think the trip from Endicott to NYC took quite some time and maybe even a transfer; Endicott was not a major stop. Nearby Binghamton NY had more service. Both the Erie and Lackawanna lines terminated in NJ and one had to take a ferry to NYC. If one was going to Washington, I don't know how they would've gone--probably all the way into NYC and then out again. I can't help but suspect IBM stopped using the railroad for business travel to-from Endicott by around 1960, long before the trains themselves stopped running. Probably drove their cars using the new New York Thruway.

Watson Jr noted in his memoirs that his father hated flying and stuck to the train; which kept IBM's labs and factories on a relatively smaller geographic world on the east coast. Watson Jr established labs elsewhere, including San Jose Calif to attract more good engineers who weren't interested in coming east in the cold and snow. Physicist Richard Feynman said the snow at Cornell was a reason he left there for California.

The father did however cross the ocean several times and spend months in Europe.

Watson Jr mentioned this in his memoirs. He had a far east trip in the late 1930s. At first he seemed fun, but later it got threatening and he was glad to get out of there.