Jacquard's Web Quotes

“Their reliability was such that they were used by the French Army as late as 1940”
― James Essinger, Jacquard's Web: How a hand-loom led to the birth of the information age

“Most organisations, when they would dream of the exaltations of the present, roll their eyes backward. The International Business Machines Corporation has beheld no past so golden as the present. The face of Providence is shining upon it, and clouds are parted to make way for it. Marching onward as to war, it has skirted the slough of depression and averted the quicksands of false booms. Save for a few lulls that may be described as breathing spells, its growth has been strong and steady. From a report in Fortune magazine, 1940”
― James Essinger, Jacquard's Web: How a hand-loom led to the birth of the information age

“IBM had its origins in Jacquard’s endeavours in Revolutionary France. And indeed IBM is, indeed, a direct descendant of the work that went on in Jacquard’s workshop during the last years of the eighteenth century and the first years of the nineteenth.”
― James Essinger, Jacquard's Web: How a hand-loom led to the birth of the information age

“The clash of Watson’s and Hollerith’s personalities was a classical example of a brash, energetic, visionary newcomer confronting a staid traditionalist.”
― James Essinger, Jacquard's Web: How a hand-loom led to the birth of the information age

“Hollerith regarded engineers as backroom boys who worked best when they were left alone. Watson, on the other hand, was quick to chase engineers out of the laboratory and into customers’ offices to find out precisely what functions and features customers needed from their machines.”
― James Essinger, Jacquard's Web: How a hand-loom led to the birth of the information age

“Hollerith was at heart an academic inventor whose commercial success, though not his technological achievement, had in a sense been something of an accident. Watson believed that in business, as in life, things did not happen by accident but because you willed them to happen and took the practical steps to turn your wishes into reality. For Watson, making customers happy was the most serious thing in the world. Hollerith, though, was much more interested in technical issues.”
― James Essinger, Jacquard's Web: How a hand-loom led to the birth of the information age

“One of Watson’s many passionately held beliefs was that too many people failed to fulfil their potential because they didn’t make enough effort to use their brains. He insisted that the word ‘THINK’ be posted on placards around C-T-R’s offices and also on people’s desks.”
― James Essinger, Jacquard's Web: How a hand-loom led to the birth of the information age

“Watson demanded total loyalty to the corporation from everybody it employed. ‘Joining a company,’ he would tell his staff, ‘is an act that calls for absolute loyalty in big matters and little ones.’ His message was that the company was the employee’s ‘friend’ and that a ‘family spirit’ combined with ‘vision and faith’, was as important for its success as an array of products that knocked the competition for six. He insisted that no drinking took place during business hours.”
― James Essinger, Jacquard's Web: How a hand-loom led to the birth of the information age

“His other deals had tended to bring together companies from the same industry horizontally, or merge customers with their suppliers vertically, or bring together firms involved in different steps of manufacturing or marketing: this was known as a circular merger. But the merger that had produced C-T-R was, as Flint put it when he looked back on it later in his career, neither horizontal nor vertical nor circular. In fact, it was so uncommon as to almost justify the description sui generis—in a class by itself. Flint soon turned out to be right yet again. The C-T-R merger was a success from the outset. Flint was careful to ensure that a gospel of technical excellence and constant improvement of the new organization’s products was fundamental to its business philosophy.”
― James Essinger, Jacquard's Web: How a hand-loom led to the birth of the information age

“Crucial decisions in business are taken as much for emotional reasons as for logical ones, perhaps even more so. The tabulators inspired a level of emotion in Flint and in other powerful American businessmen that did indeed make these people feel certain they were witnessing a momentous breakthrough in humankind’s mastery of information.”
― James Essinger, Jacquard's Web: How a hand-loom led to the birth of the information age

“Hollerith learned a lesson that all vendors of data processing devices and computers have learned at some point: that the biggest market for information processing systems is usually not the government sector, still less scientific or mathematical laboratories, but the offices of commercial organizations.”
― James Essinger, Jacquard's Web: How a hand-loom led to the birth of the information age

“Computer engineers of today are likely to find that if they have a two-week holiday they may miss a crucial new development in computing. Similarly, those wishing to keep abreast of mechanical engineering in the late nineteenth century had little choice but to keep working at the coalface where knowledge was being sledge-hammered out of the rock of ignorance.”
― James Essinger, Jacquard's Web: How a hand-loom led to the birth of the information age