It was a privilege to welcome Sam Palmisano to the Museum last night. He delivered his IBM Centennial lecture to a packed house in Hahn Auditorium and was, at once, thoughtful, insightful, funny, disarming and personal.

We had a point-counterpoint moment at the beginning. As I said in my introduction:

At the turn of the 20th century, arguably the leading technology brand in the world was … Western Union. It was formed in 1851 by a small businessman in Rochester, New York. It grew four years later in a merger with a competitor. But by 1860 its lines barely stretched to the Mississippi River. Its market capitalization was a little over half a million dollars.

IBM Chairman Sam Palmisano

Just 40 years later, in 1900, Western Union operated a million miles of telegraph lines. It dominated the two major intercontinental cables to Europe and west Asia. It had given birth to the first stock ticker, the first time service, the first money transfer service, the first charge card for its customers. It was a founding stock in the Dow Jones Transportation Average. Its market capitalization was in the range of $125 million. In 1900 it carried 60 million messages and made 40 percent margins.

It was, in short, one of the largest, most far-flung, most profitable technology based companies in history up to that time. And hugely innovative for its day.

It turns out, however, that innovation alone is not enough. History—the history of technology, the history of computing—is replete with those lessons. Western Union is one kind of lesson. IBM is quite another.

This—at least in part—is what the Museum is all about. It’s about connecting the past to the future through the stories and objects that bring these lessons vividly to life: the risks, the rewards, the problems solved, and yes, even the failures. But most of all, we seek to be about the enormous progress and the vast social change that computing has brought to the world—and the stories of the men and women who brought that change, and are bringing it right through to today.

We are therefore honored tonight to be included in the observance of a remarkable milestone: the IBM centennial. It is not just remarkable to have IBM celebrating 100 years as a company. To those of us in the history business, it is equally remarkable—and wonderful—that IBM is taking an entire year to reflect on and celebrate its legacy as a game-changer, again and again, in a field where changing the game successfully is incredibly hard.

Much of that legacy is down to its leadership. The DNA of Thomas J. Watson Sr. and Thomas J. Watson Jr. is of course deeply engrained in the company. But it takes an equally unique kind of leader to steer the Battleship IBM relentlessly toward the future on the one hand, and, simultaneously, direct at least part of its corporate attention through a year-long meditation on its past, and its legacy. We hear it all the time in Silicon Valley—no matter how much past we have as a company, we have a lot more future.

Why has Sam Palmisano done this? What has it meant to the company? What does it say about IBM, the way it thinks, the things it values? And what does this say about the larger human need for our collective past to be tied to a hopeful future?

In his formal remarks, Palmisano summed up the importance of IBM’s dual focus on the past and the future in this way: “You have to learn to overcome not just your failures, but your successes.

“You’ve got to innovate. You can’t sit still. There’s a relentless need to change.”

Investors Business Daily has a great summary of his remarks, and the evening, here.

Before the lecture, Sam and I had a chance to tour “Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing” together with our chairman, Len Shustek. Happily, I also had a moment to show Sam our restoration of two working IBM 1401 systems and talk about our upcoming project to expand the lab into a public experience. Bill Worthington–a member of the 1401 Restoration Team, senior docent and 40-year IBMer himself–gave Sam a great overview.