IBM's operating groups. Tom Jr. believed his most important influence was Albert Lynn Williams, a CPA, who became president of IBM in 1961. Although the initiative, and as such much of the credit for the birth of the information revolution, must go to Tom Jr., considerable courage was also displayed by his then aging father who, despite his long commitment to internal funding, backed his son to the hilt; reportedly with the words "It is harder to keep a business great than it is to build it." In 1968, Tom Jr. fired computer scientist Lynn Conway because he feared the news of her transition would affect the company's reputation. Research and development Prior to his time, IBM had primarily emphasized the sales organization, with a reasonable range of products. Tom Jr., however, promoted a research and development structure. The first result of this was the IBM 7030 Stretch program to develop a transistorized "supercomputer"; it failed to meet its price and performance goals, at a reported cost of $20 million. Although embarrassing in terms of the rumors that drifted to the outside world, it would not however be the last IBM computer series to be terminated and the cost was small in IBM's terms; and the experience gained was invaluable. One of IBM's strengths was that, until the 1980s, it really did learn from experience. Most other companies are only too anxious to bury deep their embarrassing mistakes; and never use the invaluable information they have gained. IBM however made very good use of these particularly hard earned lessons. The three computer families that eventually emerged from 1958 onwards comprised the IBM 7070 and IBM 7090 for large government business and large businesses, the IBM 1620 for smaller customers in the scientific community, and the IBM 1401 for commercial use by smaller organizations. Despite the fact that many observers believed that Tom Jr was frittering away the resources his father had built up, these new ranges were remarkably successful, doubling IBM's sales once more over the six years from 1958 ($1.17 billion) to 1964 ($2.31 billion), maintaining IBM's dramatic growth rate virtually undiminished at approaching 30% compound. The effect was that IBM had become independent of outside funding. In the early 1960s he oversaw the IBM System/360 project, which produced an entire line of computers that ran the same software and used the same peripherals. Since the 360 line was