IBM veteran has seen it all before

After 38 years with IBM, Elwyn Goldsbury has a keen eye for technology.

For Elwyn Goldsbury, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

The 59-year-old information technology architect, who joined IBM New Zealand 38 years ago, remembers a time when the company's accounting machines needed constant oil and grease to keep them running.

And although the machines have changed and evolved significantly in his time, the basics behind them, he says, are still the same.

"The knowledge of the machine's architecture and how the machine works is still completely valid today as it was back then."

IBM this week celebrates 50 years in New Zealand. The company set up shop in New Zealand in 1955 with 10 employees, and in 1956 managed turnover of 31,000 (NZ pounds). Since then, it has grown to 970 employees and 2004 revenue of $390 million.

Having joined the company in 1967 at the age of 21, Goldsbury is its longest-serving employee and elder statesman.

He moved to Auckland from Wanganui in 1965 to study science at Auckland University, but dropped out and started working for a local electronics company.

Soon after, he replied to an IBM newspaper advertisement for a computer engineer and, with his knowledge of electronics, landed the job.

After a four-month training programme in Wellington, he began maintaining accounting machines - one-tonne, 2m-high mechanical monstrosities that used punch cards to keep track of products, costs and quantities - for customers which at the time included the Post Office.

It wasn't long before he moved on to computers based on sophisticated transistors - although in the computer world, sophistication often quickly becomes obsolescence.

A computer in the late 1960s had six megabytes of hard drive capacity - equivalent to a single image file on a modern digital camera - and yet "customers in those days ran a whole business accounting system off that sort of disk storage", Goldsbury says.

Until computer screens were introduced in the mid 1970s, technicians read panels of flashing lights and dials like something from a dated science fiction movie.

Goldsbury says the biggest change of the past 38 years has been the evolution of technology from replicating human behaviour to transforming it. From networks that make it possible to earn wages, shop and pay bills without ever physically seeing money, to simply calling home, the advance of technology is everywhere. It's a fact that is taken for granted, he says.

"Look at things like using a telephone," he says.

"To dial the other side of the world was an almost unheard of act in the early 1960s."

Goldsbury was part of the team that built ibm.net in the late 1980s, one of the country's first internet service providers.

"We saw it had a horrendous potential, but it was very difficult to predict to what extent it would grow."

So what is next for Goldsbury, technology and IBM? Goldsbury has no plans to retire and still keeps his eye out for the next technological wave. Before long, he says, our fridges will tell us what to buy at the supermarket.