Until the arrival of Elliot Noyes as IBM consulting director of design, IBM’s many office products were a confusion of styles: from 1930s-era punched card equipment—complete with steel Queen Anne legs—to room sized computers inflected with mid-century styling, festooned with tiny signal lamps. As IBM consolidated its various product lines in the early 1960s, most importantly with the 1964 System/360 mainframe, it also consolidated its corporate style: Noyes simplified IBM’s design vernacular to ...