IBM and Microsoft designed OS/2 as the protected-mode successor to DOS, but technical compromises, a changing PC market and the rise of Windows fractured the alliance and left OS/2 without platform control.
IBM released Eclipse as open source in 2001 and helped turn it into a vendor-neutral platform where plug-ins could extend one common IDE architecture across languages and tools.
The SAGE air-defense system put operators in front of graphical displays with light guns and real-time data, making interactive computer control a large-scale operational reality in the 1950s.
Kenneth Iverson's array-oriented mathematical notation evolved at IBM into APL, an interactive programming language whose compact operators treated whole arrays as primary objects of thought and computation.
The Data Encryption Standard turned an IBM block cipher lineage into a public federal standard, catalyzing commercial cryptography while also provoking decades of debate over key length, government influence, and cryptanalytic confidence.
IBM's CP/CMS and VM lineage showed that one physical mainframe could present many isolated virtual computers, turning virtualization into a practical operating-system architecture decades before modern cloud computing.
FORTRAN did more than introduce convenient mathematical notation. Its compiler proved that a high-level language could produce code efficient enough for serious scientific work.