Written for the IBM Quantum Developer Conference, Chicago, November 11–13, 2026.
For about three decades IBM paid for, lent machines to, and showed some of the most important early films about computers. Meanwhile, its computers were being used to create new sounds. Over roughly the same years, its labs did much of the founding work on the physics of information, which eventually became IBM Quantum.
Many of the films can be found on my list, Films of The IBM, and the music on my playlist, Sounds of the IBM.
I. Cinema and sound
1931IBM publishes Songs of the IBM, a company songbook dedicated to "our beloved President, Mr. Thos. J. Watson."
- "Ever Onward"
Before Big Blue funded the avant-garde, these almost cult-like anthems of executive worship capture the rigid corporate orthodoxy IBM would spend the next two decades shedding. The tunes behind the songbook: Songs of The IBM.
1945IBM opens the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory at Columbia, to take on problems "for scientific interest" alone.
- The Information Machine
The Eames Office's first commissioned film, for IBM. Music by Elmer Bernstein. - The Silver Scale
Made with Max Mathews's MUSIC, run on an IBM 704: computer sound begins. - Bell Labs, not IBM. Almost all of the famous early "IBM music" was made by Bell Labs researchers such as Max Mathews, working on IBM 704, 7090 and 7094 mainframes. Mathews's first piece played on a 704 in New York. The work grew out of acoustics and speech research, digital-to-analog converters and speech synthesis, and John Pierce thought it "more about sound than about the creation of good music."
1958It plays in IBM's pavilion at Expo 58, Brussels.
- Mathematica: A World of Numbers… and Beyond
An exhibition with five animated "peep shows," on view at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry from 1961 to 1980.
1961IBM Research moves into Eero Saarinen's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights.
- Made at Bell Labs, on IBM 7090 and 7094 mainframes (ETHW): Zajac's satellite simulation (1963), Knowlton's BEFLIX film (1964), Noll's Computer-Generated Ballet (1965), VanDerBeek and Knowlton's Poem Fields (1964–67), The Incredible Machine (1968), and Schwartz's Pixillation, UFOs, Olympiad and Enigma (1970–72).
- "Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two)"
An IBM mainframe sings. Arthur C. Clarke heard it, and it is the song HAL sings as he is shut down in 2001.
"Oh, the bells, bells, bells!"
Edgar Allan Poe, "The Bells," 1849
1964John Bell shows that no theory of local hidden variables can reproduce quantum mechanics. In 1969 Clauser, Horne, Shimony and Holt design a test: measure two entangled particles along chosen angles, and any classical account keeps the correlation sum S at or below 2, whereas quantum mechanics reaches 2√2. I should note that John Bell has no relation to Bell Labs, nor does he have relation to Daisy Bell.
Run every six hours on IBM hardware for this page: a Bell pair, measured along four pairs of angles, 1,000 times each.
1964IBM's pavilion at the New York World's Fair: Saarinen's building, the Eameses' 22-screen Think.
1966IBM gives John Whitney a research grant. With IBM's Jack Citron he makes films on an IBM 2250 display.
- Homage to Rameau, Permutations and Experiments in Motion Graphics
- The Paperwork Explosion
For IBM's MT/ST: "Machines should work. People should think." - Hummingbird
Computed on an IBM mainframe. - 2001: A Space Odyssey
Kubrick asked IBM for advice on HAL, then worried IBM didn't know HAL was "a psychotic computer." HAL's last song is "Daisy Bell". - A Computer Glossary
1971IBM's Chicago office rises on Wabash: one of Mies van der Rohe's last American designs, finished two years after his death.
- Computer Perspective
- Powers of Ten
Distributed by IBM, with music by Elmer Bernstein. It opens on a picnic at Museum Campus, Chicago, and ends inside a carbon nucleus.
The last frame is a proton at 10⁻¹⁶ m. This is at the scale of quantum field theory.
1981Binnig and Rohrer build the scanning tunneling microscope at IBM Zurich (Nobel Prize, 1986).
- A Sequence from the Evolution of Form
- Mutations
- IBM itself rarely took up music, with two minor exceptions: the IBM Music Feature Card (1987), a $495 Yamaha FM sound card for the PC that found few buyers, and the US Open Sessions (2014), in which James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem turned US Open match data into music for IBM.
II. Information
Back to 1961, in a different part of the company.
May 1981MIT and IBM hold the Physics of Computation conference at Endicott House. Feynman: "Nature isn't classical, dammit."
- Simulating Physics with Computers
His talk from the conference. - Quantum Cryptography: Public Key Distribution and Coin Tossing
1989Eigler and Schweizer spell "IBM" in 35 xenon atoms at IBM Almaden.
- Teleporting an Unknown Quantum State via Dual Classical and Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen Channels
- Confinement of Electrons to Quantum Corrals on a Metal Surface
1994Peter Shor, at Bell Labs, shows a quantum computer could factor efficiently.
- The Physical Implementation of Quantum Computation
- Experimental Realization of Shor's Quantum Factoring Algorithm Using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance
15 = 3 × 5, on seven nuclear spins.
2011IBM turns 100. Errol Morris makes They Were There for the centennial.
A connection!
- A Boy and His Atom
242 frames of carbon monoxide molecules, moved with a scanning tunneling microscope. - Moving Atoms: Making the World's Smallest Movie
III. Quantum
May 4, 2016IBM puts a five-qubit processor on the cloud.
2018The National Quantum Initiative Act becomes law.
2024The first Quantum Developer Conference, in the Saarinen building at Yorktown Heights.
2025The International Year of Quantum. IBM plans Starling for 2029, advances in DARPA's Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, and shows Nighthawk and Loon.
- The first reference architecture for quantum-centric supercomputing
Quantum processors join classical supercomputers.
July 30, 2026IBM claims quantum advantage three times over, with the University of Chicago, Qedma and Algorithmiq.
- Sampling Hard Circuits with Verifiably High Fidelity
- Classical Simulation and Design Frontiers for IBM's Doped Clifford Sampling Experiment
August 2026IBM connects its first modular cryogenic systems.
- The continuous path from error mitigation to fault-tolerant quantum computing
- A theoretical separation between quantum computers and large language models
October 2026IBM advances to Stage C of DARPA's Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, and links quantum processors with l-couplers.
- Directed execution: Scaling a research platform for quantum error correction
- Qiskit beyond Python: Fortran, C++, and Julia
November 2026On November 6, an IBM Quantum System Two arrives in Chicago, at the University of Chicago's Hyde Park Labs, for the National Quantum Algorithm Center. It will move to the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park.
- Programmable qubits
- 120
- Physical qubits
- 458
- 2Q error (best)
- 8.223E-4
- 2Q error (layered)
- 5.116E-3
- 2Q error (median)
- 1.765E-3
- Readout error (median)
- 6.714E-3
- CLOPS
- 2.0M
- Max circuits per second
- 104.5 kHz
- Pending jobs
- 471
Data from IBM Quantum Platform, updated hourly
Kind of like the tourist walk!
November 11–13, 2026The Quantum Developer Conference meets at the Sheraton Grand Riverwalk in Chicago, about two miles north of the Powers of Ten picnic. I'm presenting Resource Analysis of Quantum Amplitude Estimation for a GPU Monte Carlo Integrator.
An unofficial evening hangout is planned afterward at the Chicago Athletic Association's Game Room.
Chicago
- IBM's exhibit at A Century of Progress
- Mathematica, at the Museum of Science and Industry
- IBM Building, 330 North Wabash
- The Powers of Ten picnic, Museum Campus
- IBM Quantum System Two, Hyde Park Labs
- Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park
- Quantum Developer Conference, Sheraton Grand Riverwalk
see: Chicago