ibm.com homepage history in screen shots

v2: 13 September 1994

From May through August there was heated discussion on the internal IBMWWW mailing list about what IBM’s web presence should consist of. At the time I was the lead tech for the launch of a web site for the Large Scale Computing Division which con­sisted of IBM’s System/390 and POWERparallel systems groups. There was actually an interim “version” which dropped many of the imagemapped graphics for plain text. Again, no ar­chives existed of this version as far as I know.

v4: Lotus Takeover (June 1995)

This is still the same design system, though the lan­guage–specific links were removed and re­placed with a ro­tating (via server–side include) ad banner from IBM’s Solutions for a small planet campaign.

The Lotus takeover was a bit of fun corporate intrigue. I had been told to make plans for the site to get “a lot of traffic” on Mon­day the 5th of June. And also: turn off the internal mirror of www.ibm.com (known as w3.ibm.com).

At the time, www.ibm.com was running NCSA 1.3 on AIX 3.2. For reasons I no longer recall, the box was rebooted on a re­gu­lar basis, I suspect to clear dead connections but again, it’s been lost to me.

So, I made plans with our systems partners at Advantis (yeah, IBM did not actually, technically, host www.ibm.com, it was hosted and administered by the Sears/IBM joint partnership Advantis). The system would be rebooted at 4:00 a.m. EDT which would give it plenty of time to be back online by whatever announcement was to occur later that day.

At the time I lived in Poughkeepsie, NY and commuted to Armonk, NY on a near daily basis, with frequent stays at the IBM Management Development Center in Armonk, or the Green­wich Harbour Inn in Greenwich, CT.

For this event I and my editorial partner, Alex Wright were told to show up in Armonk Sunday morning to do prep work and to plan to stay overnight. Later Sunday we were both briefed on what exactly was to occur the next day: IBM was going to launch a hostile takeover of Lotus, putting all of the press ma­ter­ials online on www.ibm.com.

It was kind of cool and terrifying since I had absolutely no idea what would happen. Alex and I got to listen in as Lou Gerstner talked to Jim Manzi (no, we couldn’t really hear any­thing) and as he hung up the phone we were told to make the site go live, around 8:30 a.m. EDT.

The system ran hard that day, clocking up (you may have to sit down for this) 100,000+ hits.

A new record.

Yeah, I know that your toaster can pull 100k hits and not even blink. This was 1995. Things were different then.

Update 21/04/09: I remembered why the machine had to be rebooted regularly. As I recall, AIX 3.x had a problem where there was a hard limit on the number of sockets which could ever be opened on a given system during a given window of uptime. Prior to the web only a few ftp sites had ever run into that hard limit. I don’t recall what the limit was, only that it wasn’t something obvious like 65536 or 128k or 1024k, etc. The rebooting requirement disappeared once we upgraded to AIX 4.1 later in 1995.

v5.5: July 1996 Olympic Games Edition

There was a logic to how I numbered the “versions” of www.ibm.com and IBM’s design systems, and the logic sort of breaks down here. In my scrapbook (yeah, a printed scrapbook, how corny is that) I’d labelled this v5.5. The reasoning, I think, was that while it looked somewhat different from the original v5, codewise it wasn’t all that different. Basically the versioning was based on what version of the homepage script I was on, not any formal numbering. As with many things on IBM’s web presence, and I suspect many, many other sites, what started off as an ad–hoc internal scheme became externalized and em­bedded into the processes and practices we followed.

Other than the shift of the navigation to a (once again image­mapped) vertical graphic, this shot shows the emergence of Other Voices.

Other Voices was at that time a complete pain in the ass. My boss, Carol Moore had this idea of inviting third parties to up­load content to www.ibm.com and create a sort of magazine about technology. IBM exercised no editorial control though I suspect we could have (and may have, I didn’t pay much at­ten­tion to it after it launched) vetoed any content we wanted to.

In retrospect it was a pretty cool idea and my team (by now I’d picked up two great assistant webmasters in Kapil Gupta and Jean Mountford) put together a nice set of tools to allow peo­ple like Fred Fishkin, the Yankee Group, c|net, and others to publish content on www.ibm.com with minimal intervention by my group. It wasn’t really a mashup in today’s sense of the word, but it was pretty unique especially for a staid corporate site like ours

For the course of the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games a number of the ibm.com staff got volunteered to work onsite in Atlanta on aspects of the Olympic Games website. While also running www.ibm.com. It was somewhat challenging since the Olympic Games technology people did not want us accessing non–Games systems, and the IBM Corporate security people did not want us accessing ibm.com from non–IBM networks. And the Olympic Games network, managed by IBM, was not an IBM approved network.

Somehow we managed. www.ibm.com finally crested over a million hits per day on either 18 or 19 July 1996.

You’ll note a big jump in time from August ‘95 to July ‘96 in this narrative.

In between we threw together (with an emphasis on threw) a website for the ACM Chess Challenge, also known as the first Kasparov vs. Deep Blue match. That was a disaster. After that fiasco we were able to justify a massive systems upgrade for www.ibm.com, moving from a two–system configuration (RS/6000 model 320’s with AFS as the filesystem) to our own POWERparallel SP/2 (initially 8 nodes in Schaumburg, IL but eventually composed of 24(?) nodes with 12 in Schaumburg, IL and 12 in Columbus, OH).

A final innovation (for me at any rate) during this period was that I created a testing framework for the homepage script, al­low­ing me to render versions of the page for any browser, coun­try, organization, or date (the publishing system had some date–specific options in it which we rarely used, but allowed us to post content for publication at a certain time, or for banners to run at specific times during the day. I had this whole weird little notion, based on analysis of the traffic, that we could run one set of content during the US day, and a different more con­sum­er oriented batch of content at night, at the time I’d say that 75–80% of the traffic was US originated.)

v7 January 1998

Some items to note in this version: Search is one the home­page directly, I think for the first time. The Search/­Index/­Map/­Download was a mix of Java Applet and DHTML. I don’t quite remember what the Index was. The Map mentioned was the DynamicDiagrams MAPA applet which we had been working on for forever. The MAPA applet depended critically on the graph of links amongst IBM web pages, a graph which we had a difficult time gaining access to as the web crawl­er which powered the Search engine went through various fits and starts as IBM decided to go into and out of and into and out of and (this repeats for awhile) the search business. As a non–product overhead group in Corporate we were basically screwed.

Another thing with this design was that the masthead carried the current date, defaulting to GMT if we couldn’t figure out the browser’s timezone. The timezone check was not done through JavaScript (and I’m not sure that that would have worked, though likely would), but by using the coun­try­/state­/pro­vince­/city detection code I’d written. We cheated with the mast­heads, we had a set of stock templates and some code which ran once a month to generate the appropriate graphics. Since there was no other information or graphics in the masthead it was easy to glue in the month and date. I believe, but am get­ting rusty on this, that we even had other languages in there.

Advertising banners got prominent placement again. The na­vi­gation bar moved from just under the masthead to below the main body. This was the entire page though, no scrolling, no worries about falling beneath the fold.

v9: February 1999

I’m probably messing up the dates somewhat, but after having had a relatively stable set of designs for several years, 1998—1999 saw us do three redesigns in under 18 months, maybe less. While v7 and v8 were mostly logical iterations on their pre­de­ces­sors, v9 was a hurricane that tore through our or­gan­i­za­tion and IBM’s web presence overall.

At the end of August 1998 a writer for InfoWorld wrote up a critical piece about his attempt to buy a PC from IBM. Within weeks this snowballed into a major crisis inside IBM as those–who–must–be–obeyed basically said WTF?.

At the time, IBM’s web presence was split into hundreds of fiefdoms corresponding to di­vi­sions, subdivisions within di­vi­sions, product lines. Each person, each manager, each VP, was very personally tied to his bit of the IBM web. I knew this from my near daily flamefests and escalation fights since my other hat as Corporate Webmaster was to decide on things like domain names and URLs, what fit on the web, what didn’t. It was so bad that while we were in Armonk I used to offer to hot–transfer people directly to the Chairman’s office. Since they were threatening to escalate I figured why not just shorten the entire process?.

Anyway, v9 was very different from every previous redesign. The closest in comparison was the v4 redesign, my first, which instituted the idea of a common design sys­tem across the web.

The goal of v9 was to move beyond a common design sys­tem to a common information architecture.

We were to tightly integrate all web pages with each other, with the Support site, with the Downloads site, with the online store Shop IBM. Most of the hard work on the technical side was done by my team, I was off donning fire–resistant suits and wading into battle with all sorts of people and organizations. Employees were deeply offended and hurt that their elegant interpretation of the IBM logo had to go. That they could no longer sell goods through their home grown e–commerce sys­tem. That they had to separate out the fact that the pro­ducts they were responsible for were not necessarily running the web site (though they could, if you could just get over that whole codepage/character encoding thing!). Alister Lewis–Bowen came up with a great hack of using a simple bit of DNS mis­di­rec­tion and a proxy server on our internal network to allow peo­ple to thoroughly test all of their links before the site went live.

The production site used a huge database of product re­di­rects coupled with a taxonomy so that we could guarantee that a link to http://www.ibm.com­/products/­laptops/­thinkpads/­755ce/support would always work, regardless of where that content actually lived.

My only memorable contribution to v9 is its very blue color. I don’t remember the precise circumstances anymore, but a num­ber of us were gathered around the lead designer’s cube, staring at the screen, trying to figure out what the page needed. Some­how I suggested making the entire field blue. Everyone gathered around forgot that I am mildly color blind. I’m not sure if I was or was not joking, but that’s what we ended up with. It is for this reason I’m prohibited from practicing web design in a num­ber of jurisdictions.

From a webmaster’s perspective, the homepage for v9 was relatively easy. It utilized a lot of the ex­ist­ing “rotation” code, but it was also a lot simpler. While we launched with the ex­ist­ing “IBM Planetwide” CGI for the homepage intact, within weeks we had optimized it down to a simple script which picked one of a limited set of variations on the page. All of the fancy coun­try/ci­ty/state/time­zone/lan­guage stuff was discarded, it just wasn’t very useful and the DNS lookups and calculations and disk hits for database lookups (oh, yeah, we were generally pre­vent­ed from using IBM’s DB2 database as a live source of content).

The v9 launch was insane compared to previous redesigns. In the past we would communicate out to key contacts in the divisions that we were launching the new design during a certain time–range on a given day. If the entire design system was chang­ing they would have to wait until we launched, but if we were just tweaking the homepage there was frequently little work to do for staff on the division sites.

But for v9 we had a global conference call, run by our war room. Everything was synchronized down to when the new de­sign system went live on www.ibm.com. It took two tries to launch as we had difficulty getting some of the second tier sites like ShopIBM to understand that once www.ibm.com flipped to the new design there was no going back, they had to be able to commit to chang­ing over. It wasn’t a technical issue, the change­over for us was relatively easy as we’d already staged all of the graphics, we’d been using versioned URLs for years, the entire process took maybe ten minutes for www.ibm.com (since, again, we didn’t have a content management system, the process was to unpack a massive hair tarball of static pages.

Since my role was basically to stand by and help work out problems as they occurred, I decided to throw a movie into the conference room projector. As it turns out, very few people en­joyed my choice of Apollo 13 for the movie to play while the redesign went live.

Also as it turns out, this would be my last redesign for www.ibm.com. On a personal note, 1999 was an incredibly crappy year for me and our team. We were on the losing side of a political battle for control over the technology platform for www.ibm.com, one of our webmasters spent much of the year battling cancer, and there was a general sense of a change in tone, mood, approach to the web inside IBM, harshly exposed by the politics surrounding the v9 launch and its aftermath. By August 1999 www.ibm.com had been migrated off the now–ancient SP2 complex (which had been nicknamed the edplex). We had to migrate, the complex was not Y2K ready. Apparently in 1996 no one had the foresight to think a multimillion dollar supercomputer would still be running in the distant year 2000. By September 2000 Alex Wright and I would separately decide to leave www.ibm.com behind, he for a West Coast startup, while I took on managing the web site for the Sydney Olympic Games. Tip to executives: don’t give your rock stars golden handcuffs which vest/expire the same day.

v11: March 2001

I had a minor role with this redesign. At the time I was on sab­ba­ti­cal from IBM, having decided to take nine months off after the Olympic Games to get my head together, planning to return to work in September 2001. I was dating the manager of the ibm.com user experience team, Lisa Kamm, and sat in as the design went live.

I don’t know that much about this design, key things to note are the shift of search into the masthead proper, elimination of the selection list, and elimination of the explicit “ShopIBM” link. I got to listen in on the calls as Lisa tried to explain why re­mov­ing the link to the online store was a good thing to various incredulous executives. I don’t know the details, but I do know sales increased significantly after the explicit link was removed (people got to the store through search results and the product pages).

The top navigation was simplified, with some links getting de­moted to the footer of the page. The logo appears against a gradient background (this may have started in v10?).