Product Description

A narrative history of one of IBM's most illustrious and secretive organizations -- IBM's Federal Systems Division -- that protected America, helped NASA put men on the moon, and spawned such technology as today's Internet, ATM transactions, ebay operations and online banking. Included in the book are space-age computer and weapons systems details never before shown to the public. Federal Systems developed such things as a dispatch system for New York City's police force, international banking systems in the UK, Japan and other countries, and a special operations system for the New York Stock Exchange. This is the first book ever written about this semi-clandestine organization operating under the IBM umbrella that supported NASA's projects from Project Mercury to Space Shuttles and Skylab. Federal Systems was also a major part of the development of modern weapons technology. Each chapter of the book focuses on one aspect of Federal Systems' 50-year history of service to the government. The organization changed hands during an IBM selloff in the early 1990s to Loral Corporation, which in turn sold it to Lockheed Martin in 1996.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1735893 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

Customer Reviews

A must for those who love technology and its history
IBM is best known as a computer hardware company, and they have had a strong relation with the federal government for decades. "IBM's Shadow Force: The Untold Story of Federal Systems The Secretive Giant That Safeguarded America" takes an eye to this relationship and how it has protected the nation through the information age and the era around it. From putting a man on the moon to internet security, it's a scholarly look at how far technology has come in the past years. "IBM's Shadow Force" is a must for those who love technology and its history.

Too bad it's not complete.....
I worked for several years on a project that only got about 2 inches of text in this whole book.

Either the author wasn't much aware of this project ( it was known as Safeguard, an antiballistic missile system that was developed in Whippany, NJ) or he didn't feel it was important enough to mention it.

If nothing else, it gave me a better appreciation of why a toilet seat costs at least $7 to the military--you have to have someplace to hide the costs of these projects from the general public. It's just too bad that those state-of-the-art machines ended up in a New Jersey dump when the project ended/lost funding.

Reads like an inventory list
I knew of the FSD from reading several other books about IBM. None of them went into much detail. I thought this would go into more detail. It was a fast read. When I got done it felt more like I had read an inventory list of systems.

I was hoping for a style more like the books Emerson W. Pugh was involved in.

It is impressive to see what technology IBM had their fingers in.