IBM, THE COMPUTING-TABULATING-RECORDING IN 1911

Today, The Grandma has been reading about IBM, the American multinational technology company that was founded as the Computing Tabulating Recording Company on a day like today in 1911.

International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York and present in over 175 countries.

IBM is the largest industrial research organization in the world, with 19 research facilities across a dozen countries, having held the record for most annual U.S. patents generated by a business for 29 consecutive years from 1993 to 2021.

IBM was founded in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR), a holding company of manufacturers of record-keeping and measuring systems. It was renamed International Business Machines in 1924 and soon became the leading manufacturer of punch-card tabulating systems. 

During the 1960s and 1970s, the IBM mainframe, exemplified by the System/360, was the world's dominant computing platform, with the company producing 80 percent of computers in the U.S. and 70 percent of computers worldwide.

IBM entered the microcomputer market in the 1980s with the IBM Personal Computer, which soon became known as PC, one of IBM's best selling products. Due to a lack of foresight by IBM, the PC was not well protected by intellectual property laws. As a consequence, IBM quickly began losing its market dominance to emerging competitors in the PC market, while at the same time the openness of the PC platform has ensured PC's longevity as the most popular microcomputer standard.

Beginning in the 1990s, the company began downsizing its operations and divesting from commodity production, most notably selling its personal computer division to the Lenovo Group in 2005. IBM has since concentrated on computer services, software, supercomputers, and scientific research. Since 2000, its supercomputers have consistently ranked among the most powerful in the world, and in 2001 it became the first company to generate more than 3,000 patents in one year, beating this record in 2008 with over 4,000 patents. As of 2022, the company held 150,000 patents.

As one of the world's oldest and largest technology companies, IBM has been responsible for several technological innovations, including the automated teller machine (ATM), dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), the floppy disk, the hard disk drive, the magnetic stripe card, the relational database, the SQL programming language, and the UPC barcode. The company has made inroads in advanced computer chips, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and data infrastructure. IBM employees and alumni have won various recognitions for their scientific research and inventions, including six Nobel Prizes and six Turing Awards.

More information: IBM

IBM is a publicly traded company and one of 30 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. It is among the world's largest employers, with over 297,900 employees worldwide in 2022. Despite its relative decline within the technology sector, IBM remains the seventh largest technology company by revenue, and 67th largest overall company by revenue in the United States. It is also consistently ranked among the world's most recognizable, valuable, and admired brands.

IBM originated with several technological innovations developed and commercialized in the late 19th century. Julius E. Pitrap patented the computing scale in 1885; Alexander Dey invented the dial recorder (1888); Herman Hollerith patented the Electric Tabulating Machine (1889); and Willard Bundy invented a time clock to record workers' arrival and departure times on a paper tape (1889).

On June 16, 1911, their four companies were amalgamated in New York State by Charles Ranlett Flint forming a fifth company, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) based in Endicott, New York. The five companies had 1,300 employees and offices and plants in Endicott and Binghamton, New York; Dayton, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; Washington, D.C.; and Toronto, Canada.

IBM has a large and diverse portfolio of products and services. As of 2016, these offerings fall into the categories of cloud computing, artificial intelligence, commerce, data and analytics, Internet of things (IoT), IT infrastructure, mobile, digital workplace and cybersecurity.

IBM Cloud includes infrastructure as a service (IaaS), software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) offered through public, private and hybrid cloud delivery models. For instance, the IBM Bluemix PaaS enables developers to quickly create complex websites on a pay-as-you-go model. IBM SoftLayer is a dedicated server, managed hosting and cloud computing provider, which in 2011 reported hosting more than 81,000 servers for more than 26,000 customers. IBM also provides Cloud Data Encryption Services (ICDES), using cryptographic splitting to secure customer data.

Hardware designed by IBM for these categories include IBM's Power microprocessors, which were designed into many console gaming systems, including Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Nintendo's Wii U. IBM Secure Blue is encryption hardware that can be built into microprocessors, and in 2014, the company revealed TrueNorth, a neuromorphic CMOS integrated circuit and announced a $3 billion investment over the following five years to design a neural chip that mimics the human brain, with 10 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses, but that uses just 1 kilowatt of power.

In 2016, the company launched all-flash arrays designed for small and midsized companies, which includes software for data compression, provisioning, and snapshots across various systems.

More information: IBM

 We can learn from IBM's successful history
that you don't have to have the best product
to become number one.
You don't even have to have a good product.

Adam Osborne