Before computers, IBM's ancestor companies sold scales, time clocks and cheese slicers
In 1911 a financier named Charles Flint merged four businesses making computing scales, dial recorders, tabulating machines and workplace time clocks. The new firm, based in Endicott, New York, also sold meat and cheese slicers. Thirteen years later it took a grander name borrowed from its Canadian branch: International Business Machines.
The man behind the rename was Thomas J. Watson Sr., who had been fired from the National Cash Register Company and joined in 1914. He brought NCR's methods with him: sales conventions, generous incentives, a fixation on customer service, dark-suited salesmen and a one-word slogan, THINK, that became a company mantra. He disliked the clumsy hyphenated original name, Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, and in 1924 replaced it.
IBM soon led in punch-card tabulators, then moved into electronic computers with the vacuum-tube 701 in 1952. Its lab work produced remarkable firsts. In 1956 Arthur Samuel programmed an IBM 704 to play checkers and learn from experience, an early glimpse of artificial intelligence. In 1961 an IBM 7094 sang Daisy Bell, the first song performed entirely by a computer, a recording now kept in the US National Recording Registry. IBM computers also helped NASA track Mercury flights and guided Apollo spacecraft.
The big bet came on 7 April 1964 with the System/360, the first family of compatible computers spanning small to large, which let customers upgrade without rewriting their software. During the 1960s and 1970s IBM made around 70 percent of the world's computers. Its 1981 Personal Computer set the architecture most PCs still follow, but because the design was poorly protected, rivals cloned it and IBM lost control of the market it had created. The PC division was sold to Lenovo in 2005.
The list of IBM inventions reaches into daily life: the hard disk drive, the floppy disk, DRAM memory, the relational database, the magnetic stripe card devised by Forrest Parry in 1969, and George Laurer's barcode in 1974. From 1993 to 2021 it earned more US patents each year than any other company.
Source: IBM
