IBM
International Business Machines Corporation — IBM — is the oldest continuously operating information-technology company in the world. Founded in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company and renamed in 1924, it carried the punched card from census counting to global industry, dominated computing for most of the twentieth century, invented an unreasonable share of its foundations, and remains a major force in enterprise computing, research, and artificial intelligence.
Origins: the merger (1911)
IBM did not begin as one company but four, merged on 16 June 1911 by financier Charles Ranlett Flint:
- The Tabulating Machine Company — Herman Hollerith's census-tabulator business, the piece that would define the whole.
- The International Time Recording Company — workplace time clocks.
- The Computing Scale Company — commercial scales.
- The Bundy Manufacturing Company — time-recording equipment.
The combined firm — CTR — employed about 1,300 people and sold machines that measured, weighed, recorded, and counted. In 1914 Flint hired Thomas J. Watson Sr. away from National Cash Register to run it. Watson renamed the company International Business Machines in 1924 and, over the next four decades, built it into something with few precedents: a company whose culture was a product in itself.
The Watson era: a culture called THINK
Watson Sr. — autocratic, charismatic, and genuinely visionary about information — built IBM around sales discipline, lifetime employment, company songs, a dress code of white shirts and dark suits, and a single-word motto that hung in every office: THINK. (The motto predates him — it came from NCR — but Watson made it an institution. The laptop line "ThinkPad" is its descendant.)
IBM under Watson survived the Great Depression without layoffs, kept factories running, and stored the surplus machines — which turned out to be exactly what a new customer needed: the Social Security Act of 1935 created the largest data-processing contract in history, and IBM had the machines and the cards to win it. The U.S. government remained IBM's biggest customer for decades.
It is also necessary to record the era's darkest page: IBM's German subsidiary's tabulating equipment was used by the Nazi regime for census and administrative purposes before and during World War II, a history examined in Edwin Black's IBM and the Holocaust (2001) and debated by historians ever since. IBM has neither fully acknowledged nor resolved the extent of wartime knowledge in New York; the episode stands as a permanent caution about who uses information machinery, and for what.
From cards to computers (1940s–1964)
Watson Sr. distrusted electronics — IBM's heart was electromechanical. But the cards were already feeding machines that computed:
- 1937–1944 — IBM built the Harvard Mark I (ASCC) for Howard Aiken: a 51-foot electromechanical calculator, program-controlled by punched paper tape.
- 1946 — the 603 Electronic Multiplier, IBM's first commercial electronic product.
- 1952 — the 701 "Defense Calculator," IBM's first stored-program computer — the year Thomas Watson Jr. took over and bet the company on electronics.
- 1956 — the RAMAC 305, the first computer with a hard disk drive: fifty 24-inch platters, 5 megabytes, a ton of hardware. The disk drive was born.
- 1957 — FORTRAN, created by an IBM team under John Backus, the first commercially successful high-level programming language. It made machine-independent programming practical and shaped every language after it — the line runs to BASIC and onward to AdaLogic BASIC.
System/360: the bet (1964)
On 7 April 1964 IBM announced the System/360 — the most consequential product launch in computing history. Instead of another incompatible machine, it was a family: six processors, forty peripherals, one architecture, one instruction set, one software base. Programs written for the smallest 360 ran on the largest. The word "architecture" applied to computers, "upgrade" as a concept, and the modern notion of software portability all date from this announcement.
It was a $5 billion bet — more than IBM's annual revenue — and it nearly broke the company; the story of its software is Frederick Brooks's The Mythical Man-Month, still the definitive book on why big projects run late ("adding manpower to a late software project makes it later"). But it worked: System/360 dominated computing for a decade, its architecture (z/Architecture today) still runs, and sixty years later banks still execute code descended from it.
The research machine
IBM Research, formalized at Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory and later Yorktown Heights and Almaden, produced a share of twentieth-century computing that no other company matches:
- Hard disk drive (1956), floppy disk (1971), DRAM (1966 — Robert Dennard's one-transistor cell).
- Relational databases — Edgar F. Codd's 1970 paper A Relational Model of Data invented the model; IBM's System R team built the first implementation and its query language, SQL (SEQUEL), in 1974.
- Magnetic stripe cards — the credit/debit card stripe is IBM, 1969.
- Bar codes — the UPC on every product was developed by IBM's George Laurer in 1973 from Norman Woodland's 1949 idea.
- Scanning tunneling microscope (1981) — imaging individual atoms; Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics.
- RISC architecture — John Cocke's 801 project (1970s) defined reduced instruction set computing, ancestor of Power, ARM's philosophy, and every modern CPU design argument.
- FORTRAN, APL, PL/I, Rexx, SNA, EBCDIC, and the 8-inch floppy as an industry medium.
- Six Nobel laureates have worked at IBM — more than most countries.
For decades IBM held the record for most U.S. patents granted annually — topping the list for 29 consecutive years (1993–2021).
The PC that ate its maker (1981)
In 1980 a skunkworks team in Boca Raton, Florida — the "Dirty Dozen" under Don Estridge — built the IBM Personal Computer (5150) in twelve months by breaking every IBM rule: off-the-shelf parts (Intel 8088), an outside operating system (Microsoft's PC-DOS), open architecture, published technical manuals, retail sale through ComputerLand and Sears.
Announced 12 August 1981, it was a triumph: "IBM compatible" became the standard the industry organized itself around. But openness meant the machine could be cloned — Compaq reverse-engineered the BIOS legally in 1982, and soon anyone could build a "PC compatible" that IBM didn't profit from. The standard IBM created escaped it: the value flowed to Microsoft (the OS) and Intel (the CPU) — "Wintel" — while IBM kept the brand name. The PC's two-decade dominance of computing was built on IBM's architecture and someone else's economics.
Crisis and reinvention (1990s)
The mainframe world collapsed under the PC, the workstation, and the client-server model. In 1993 IBM posted an $8.1 billion loss — then the largest in American corporate history — and for the first time hired an outsider as CEO: Louis Gerstner Jr. He declined to break the company up, cut costs brutally, and pivoted IBM toward services and integration — the thesis of his memoir Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? The bet worked: IBM Global Services became the largest business unit, and the company survived into an era its product line hadn't.
The modern era
- 1997 — Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov, the first machine to do so in match conditions.
- 2011 — Watson won Jeopardy! against champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, answering natural-language clues — IBM's centennial-year proof of question-answering AI.
- 2005 — sold the PC division (including ThinkPad) to Lenovo, closing the loop on the 5150.
- 2019 — acquired Red Hat for $34 billion, betting the company on hybrid cloud and open source.
- 2021 — spun off managed-infrastructure services as Kyndryl, leaving IBM focused on hybrid cloud, AI (watsonx), and quantum computing, where its IBM Quantum systems are among the world's most advanced.
Why IBM is the hinge of this history
The loom-to-IBM line is not metaphor: Hollerith's tabulator carried the Jacquard card into data processing, IBM industrialized it, and the 80-column card carried it into computing — where FORTRAN coders punched the same rectangles Joseph-Marie Jacquard's card-lacers had laced a century and a half before. IBM is where the card became the computer, and where computing became an industry.