IBM

International Business Machines Corporation (IBM, or colloquially, Big Blue) NYSE: IBM (incorporated June 15, 1911, in operation since 1888) is headquartered in Armonk, NY, USA. The company manufactures and sells computer hardware, software, and services.

With over 330,000 employees worldwide and revenues of $96 billion (figures from 2004), IBM is the largest information technology company in the world, and one of the few with a continuous history dating back to the 19th century. It has engineers and consultants in over 170 countries and development laboratories located all over the world, in all segments of computer science and information technology; some of them are pioneers in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology.

In recent years, services and consulting revenues have been larger than those from manufacturing. Samuel J. Palmisano was elected CEO on January 29, 2002 after having led IBM's Global Services, and helping it to become a business with a $100 billion in backlog in 2004 [1].

In 2002 the company strengthened its business advisory capabilities by acquiring the consulting arm of professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. The company is increasingly focused on business solution driven consulting, services and software, with emphasis also on high value chips and hardware technologies; as of 2005 it employs about 195,000 technical professionals. That total includes about 350 Distinguished Engineers and 60 IBM Fellows, its most senior engineers. IBM Research has eight laboratories, all located in the Northern Hemisphere, with five of those locations outside of the United States. IBM employees have won five Nobel Prizes. In the USA, they have earned four Turing Awards, five National Medals of Technology, and five National Medals of Science, and outside the USA, many equivalents.

Current business activities
In 2002, IBM announced the beginning of a $10 billion program to research and implement the infrastructure technology necessary to be able to provide supercomputer-level resources "on demand" to all businesses as a metered utility. This program will be implemented over the coming years.

In recent years IBM has steadily increased its patent portfolio, which is valuable for cross-licensing with other companies. In every year from 1993 until 2004, IBM has been granted significantly more U.S. patents than any other company. That twelve-year period has resulted in over 29,000 patents for which IBM is the primary assignee. [2]

IBM revenue and net earnings, 1980 to 2003
(click on the
year to go to
IBM's page of

accomplishments
for that year)
Year Patents

Granted

2004 3248
2003 3415
2002 3288
2001 3411
2000 2886
1999 2756
1998 2658
1997 1724
1996 1867
1995 1383
1994 1298
1993 1087

Protection of the company's intellectual property has grown into a business in its own right, generating over $10 billion dollars [3] to the bottom line for the company during this period. [4], [5]

As of 10 December 2004, IBM has finalized negotiations to sell its PC division to China-based Lenovo. The new division will be headquartered in New York. IBM will maintain a significant (about 19%) stake in the new division. Starting from the date of the acquisition, Lenovo will have five years' use of the IBM and "Think" trademarks.

Culture
IBM has often been described as having a sales-centric or a sales-oriented business culture. Traditionally, many of its executives and general managers would be chosen from its sales force. In addition, middle and top management would often be enlisted to give direct support to salesmen in the process of making sales to important customers.

For most of the 20th century, a blue suit, white shirt and dark tie was the public uniform of IBM employees. But by the 1990s, IBM relaxed these codes; the dress and behavior of its employees does not differ appreciably from that of their counterparts in large technology companies.

In 2003 the IBM company embarked on an ambitious project to rewrite its company values through a world-jam over the internet involving more than 50,000 employees over 3 days. The company values have been updated to reflect modern business, marketplace and employee views. "Dedication to every client's success", "Innovation that matters - for our company and the world", "Trust and personal responsibility in all relationships".

In 2004 another WorldJam was conducted in which more than 52,000 employees participated to exchange best practices for 72 hours.

IBM's culture has been recently influenced by the open source movement. The company invests billions of dollars in services and software based on Linux. This includes over 300 Linux kernel developers. IBM's open source involvement has not been trouble-free, however; see SCO v. IBM.

Diversity and workforce issues
IBM's efforts to promote workforce diversity and equal opportunity date back at least to World War I, when the company hired disabled veterans. More recently, IBM received a 100% rating on the Corporate Equality Index released by the Human Rights Campaign starting in 2003, the second year of the report. IBM is the only technology company ranked in Working Mother Magazine's Top 10 for 2004.

The company has traditionally resisted labor union organizing, although unions represent some IBM workers outside the United States. Alliance@IBM, part of the Communications Workers of America, is trying to organize IBM in the U.S.

In the 1990s, two major pension program changes, including a conversion to a cash balance plan, resulted in an employee class action lawsuit alleging age discrimination. IBM employees won the lawsuit and arrived at a partial settlement, although appeals are still underway.

Historically IBM has had a good reputation of long term staff retention with very little large scale layoffs. In more recent years there have been a number of broad sweeping cuts to the workforce as IBM attempts to adapt to changing market conditions and a declining profit base. After posting weaker than expected revenues in the first quarter of 2005, IBM eliminated 14,500 positions from its workforce, predominantly in Europe. There has also been a steadily increasing movement of labour to cheap offshore countries such as India.

History

Early years
IBM's history dates back decades before the development of electronic computers – before that it developed punched card data processing equipment. It originated as the Computing Tabulating Recording (CTR) Corporation, which was incorporated on June 15, 1911 in Binghamton, New York. This company was a merger of the Tabulating Machine Corporation, the Computing Scale Corporation and the International Time Recording Company. The president of the Tabulating Machine Corporation at that time was Herman Hollerith, who had founded the company in 1896. Thomas J. Watson Sr., the founder of IBM, became General Manager of CTR in 1914 and President in 1915. On February 14, 1924, CTR changed its name to International Business Machines Corporation.

The companies that merged to form CTR manufactured a wide range of products, including employee time keeping systems, weighing scales, automatic meat slicers, and most importantly for the development of the computer, punched card equipment. Over time CTR came to focus purely on the punched card business, and ceased its involvement in the other activities.

World War II
During World War II, IBM's German subsidiary Dehomag (an acronym formed from "German Hollerith Machine Company Ltd") provided the Nazi regime with punch card machines. Dehomag was taken over by the Nazis in December 1941. In 2001 author Edwin Black published a book titled IBM and the Holocaust, which alleged that Thomas J. Watson knew of the German regime's activities and was indifferent to any moral issues. The credibility of Black's book has been questioned, as has its claim that the Holocaust would have been impossible without Dehomag's data processing systems. The author responded to these claims here. As of 2004 IBM's possible complicity in the Holocaust is the subject of at least one unresolved lawsuit. IBM has donated more than 10,000 pages of archived documents concerning Dehomag to Hohenheim University in Germany and New York University.

Airforce and airline projects
In the 1950s, IBM became a chief contractor for developing computers for the United States Air Force's automated defense systems. Working on the SAGE anti-aircraft system, IBM gained access to crucial research being done at MIT, working on the first real-time, digital computer (which included many other advancements such as an integrated video display, magnetic core memory, light guns, the first effective algebraic computer language, analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversion techniques, digital data transmission over telephone lines, duplexing, multiprocessing, and networks). IBM built fifty-six SAGE computers at the price of $30 million each, and at the peak of the project devoted more than 7,000 employees (20% of its then workforce) to the project. More valuable to the company in the long run than the profits, however, was the access to cutting-edge research into digital computers being done under military auspices. IBM neglected, however, to gain an even more dominant role in the nascent industry by allowing the RAND Corporation to take over the job of programming the new computers, because, according to one project participant (Robert P. Crago), "we couldn't imagine where we could absorb two thousand programmers at IBM when this job would be over someday." IBM would use its experience designing massive, integrated real-time networks with SAGE to design its SABRE airline reservation system, which met with much success.

Successes of the 1960's
IBM was the largest of the eight major computer companies (with UNIVAC, Burroughs, Scientific Data Systems, Control Data Corporation, General Electric, RCA and Honeywell) through most of the 1960s. People in this business would talk of "IBM and the seven dwarfs", given the much smaller size of the other companies or of their computer divisions. When only Burroughs, Univac, NCR and Honeywell produced mainframes, a bit later, people talked of "IBM and the B.U.N.C.H.". Most of those companies are now long gone as IBM competitors, except for Unisys, which is the result of multiple mergers that included UNIVAC and Burroughs. NCR and Honeywell dropped out of the general mainframe and mini sector and concentrated on lucrative niche markets. General Electric remains one of the world's largest companies, but no longer operates in the computer market. The IBM computer range that earned it its position in the market at that time is still growing today. It was originally known as the IBM System/360 and, in far more modern 64-bit form, is now known as the IBM zSeries (often referred to as "IBM mainframes").

IBM's success in the mid-1960s led to inquiries as to IBM antitrust violations by the U.S. Department of Justice, which filed a complaint for the case U.S. v. IBM in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, on January 17, 1969. The suit alleged that IBM violated the Section 2 of the Sherman Act by monopolizing or attempting to monopolize the general purpose electronic digital computer system market, specifically computers designed primarily for business. Litigation continued until 1983, and had a significant impact on the company's practices.

Recent history
On January 19, 1993 IBM announced a USD4.97 billion loss for 1992, which was at that time the largest single-year corporate loss in United States history. Since that loss, IBM has made major changes in its business activities, shifting its focus significantly away from components and hardware and towards software and services.

In 2004, IBM announced the proposed sale of its PC business to Chinese computer maker Lenovo, which is partially owned by the Chinese government, for USD650 million in cash and USD600 million in Lenovo stock. The deal was approved by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States in March 2005, and completed in May 2005. IBM will have a 19% stake in Lenovo, which will move its headquarters to New York State and appoint an IBM executive as its chief executive officer. The company will retain the right to use certain IBM brand names for an initial period of five years.

Facts and trivia

IBM logo in Tokyo.The IBM Logo was designed by Paul Rand.
IBM's Software Group, if it were a separate entity, would be the second largest software company in the world, behind only Microsoft in total revenue. Software Group groups its products into five brands: DB2 (information management), Rational (software development lifecycle), Lotus (collaboration), Tivoli (systems management and security) and WebSphere (application integration and middleware).
IBM invented many of the core technologies used in all forms of computing, including the first hard disk drive and the Winchester hard disk drive, the cursor (on computer screens), Dynamic RAM (DRAM), the relational database, Thin Film recording heads, RISC architecture, the Scanning Tunneling Microscope, and the floppy disk. While the floppy disk is rapidly falling into disuse, the infamous Control-Alt-Delete keystroke (David Bradley, 2001: "I invented it, but it was Bill that made it famous"), also invented at IBM, is still frequently used on PCs running Windows operating systems.
The first black employee was hired in 1899 by the Computing Scale Corporation (as it was known at the time).
IBM began hiring women to work as professional systems service staff in 1935. Thomas J. Watson Sr. wrote: "Men and women will do the same kind of work for equal pay. They will have the same treatment, the same responsibilities and the same opportunities for advancement."
From 1933 to 1944, IBM punch card machines were installed at various German concentration camps. It has been alleged by a journalist that IBM president Thomas J. Watson, Sr. was aware of their use. Note however that concentration camps are a perfectly legal war disposition regulated by the Geneva convention. The problem lies with extermination camps, about which there were already a lot of war rumours, but nothing that could be confirmed or inferred formally before their discovery by allies in 1945. [6]
From 1942 to 1944 IBM was one of nine companies contracted by the US Government to produce M1 Carbine rifles; these are now sought-after antiques.
IBM also made clocks until they sold their time division in 1958.
In 1944, IBM was the first corporation to support the United Negro College Fund.
In 1953, IBM published the first US corporate mandate on equal employment opportunity, stating that the company would hire people based on their ability, "regardless of race, color or creed". Sexual orientation was added to the nondiscrimination policy in 1984.
Whilst IBM did not invent the personal computer, architectures cloned from its design for the IBM PC (which relied on third-party componentry) became the industry standard, and are now often simply called the PC. The IBM PC was introduced on August 12, 1981; Microsoft and Intel became monopoly suppliers of two of the key components of PC-compatible systems. IBM agreed to sell its PC division to Lenovo in December 2004 and, when the sale is complete, will come out of the business of manufacturing / designing / selling PCs, the business which it created in 1981.
The IBM iSeries minicomputer (in its 24-year history also variously known as i5, AS/400 and System/38) is the world's largest-selling computer family, if PC-type machines are excluded. It was the first successful 64-bit machine. It has been calculated that, if the Rochester, Minnesota facility that produces the machine were independent, it would be the third largest computer company in the world.
In 2004, for the twelfth consecutive year, IBM was awarded the greatest number of patents by the USPTO. IBM received 3,248 patents that year. (Reference: USPTO Releases Annual List of Top 10 Organizations Receiving Most U.S. Patents)

Acquisitions
1889 Bundy Manufacturing Company incorporated.
1891 Computing Scale Company incorporated.
1893 Dey Patents Company (Dey Time Registers) incorporated.
1894 Willard & Frick Manufacturing Company (Rochester, New York) incorporated.
1896 Detroit Automatic Scale Company incorporated.
1896 Tabulating Machine Company incorporated.
1899 Standard Time Stamp Company acquired by Bundy Manufacturing Company.
1900 Willard & Frick Manufacturing Company (Rochester) acquired by International Time Recording Company.
1901 Chicago Time-Register Company acquire by International Time Recording Company.
1901 Dayton Moneyweight Scale Company acquire by Computing Scale Company.
1901 Detroit Automatic Scale Company acquired by Computing Scale Company.
1902 Bundy Manufacturing Company acquired by International Time Recording Company.
1907 Dey Time Registers acquired by International Time Recording Company.
1908 Syracuse Time Recording Company acquired by International Time Recording Company.
1911 Computing Scale Company acquired by Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (C-T-R).
1911 International Time Recording Company acquired by Computing-Time-Recording Company (C-T-R).
1911 Tabulating Machine Company acquired by Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (C-T-R).
1917 American Automatic Scale Company acquired by Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (C-T-R) as International Scale Company.
1917 C-T-R opens in Canada as IBM.
1921 Pierce Accounting Machine Company (asset purchase).
1921 Ticketograph Company (of Chicago).
1924 C-T-R renamed IBM.
1930 Automatic Accounting Scale Company.
1932 National Counting Scale Company.
1933 Electromatic Typewriters Inc. (See: IBM Electromatic typewriter)
1941 Munitions Manufacturing Corporation.
August, 1959 Pierce Wire Recorder Corporation.
1984 ROLM.
1986 RealCom Communications Corporation.
1995 Lotus Development Corporation for $3.5 billion.
1995 Tivoli Systems for $750 million.
1997 Software Artistry for $200 million.
1997 Unison Software.
1998 CommQuest Technologies.
1999 Mylex Corporation.
1999 Sequent Computer Systems for $810 million.
2001 Informix Software (a purchase of assets rather than a true acquisition) for $1.0 billion.
January, 2002 Crossworlds.
2002 PricewaterhouseCoopers' Consulting for $3.5 billion (recalculated by IBM in August 2003 as $3.9 billion).
October, 2003 CrossAccess.
2003 Rational Software Corporation for $2.1 billion.
2003 Presence Online, Aptrix. July.
2004 Maersk Data & DMData.
March, 2004 Logicalis Australia and Logical CSI New Zealand, renamed to Cerulean Solutions in April 2005.
April, 2004 Candle Corp., Daksh eServices in India.
July, 2004 Alphablox.
July, 2004 Cyanea Systems.
August, 2004 Venetica.
October, 2004 Systemcorp.
February 2005 Corio crio for $211 million
May 2005 Gluecode.
July 2005 PureEdge.
August, 2005 DWL.

Spinoffs
1934 Dayton Scale Division is sold to the Hobart Manufacturing Company.
1942 Ticketograph Division is sold to the National Postal Meter Company.
1958 Time Equipment Division is sold to the Simplex Time Recorder Company.
December, 2004 Lenovo acquires IBM Personal Systems Group, 10 000 employees and $9 billion in revenue.
Taligent, a joint software venture with Apple Computer.
Lexmark (keyboards, typewriters, and printers). Lexmark has sold its keyboard and typewriter businesses. IBM Printing Systems now competes with Lexmark.
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies now provides many of the hardware storage solutions formerly provided by IBM, including IBM Harddrives & The Microdrive. IBM continues to develop storage solutions, including Tape Backup, Storage software, etc.
ScanSoft now sell and support IBM's speech technology products under the ViaVoice brand.
Prodigy, formerly a joint venture with Sears.
AT&T Business Internet, formerly IBM Global Network, formerly Advantis (joint venture with Sears).
ARDIS mobile packet network, a joint venture with Motorola. Now Motient.

Projects

BlueEyes
BlueEyes is the name of a human recognition venture initiated by IBM to allow people to interact with computers in a more natural manner. The technology aims to enable devices to recognize and use natural input, such as facial expressions. The initial developments of this project include scroll mice and other input devices that sense the user's pulse, monitor his or her facial expressions, and the movement of his or her eyelids.

alphaWorks
Free software available at alphaWorks (IBM's showcase for emerging software technology):

Flexible Internet Evaluation Report Architecture: A highly flexible architecture for the design, display, and reporting of Internet surveys.
History Flow Visualization Application: A tool for visualizing dynamic, evolving documents and the interactions of multiple collaborating authors. Examples from Wikipedia. [7] [8]
IBM Performance Simulator for Linux on POWER: A tool that provides users of Linux on Power a set of performance models for IBM's POWER processors.
Database File Archive And Restoration Management: An application for archiving and restoring hard disk files whose file references are stored in a database.
Policy Management for Autonomic Computing: A policy-based autonomic management infrastructure that simplifies the automation of IT and business processes. (This is an ETTK technology.)
FairUCE: A spam filter that stops spam by verifying sender identity instead of filtering content.

International Business Machines Corporation ( IBM, or colloquially, Big Blue) NYSE: IBM (incorporated June 15, 1911, ibm in operation since 1888) is headquartered in Armonk, NY, USA. The company manufactures and sells computer hardware, software, and services.

With over 330,000 employees worldwide and revenues of $96 billion (custom figures from
2004), IBM 6400 is the largest information technology company in the world, and one of the few with a continuous history dating back to the 19th century. It has engineers and price consultants in over 170 countries and development laboratories located all over the world, in
all segments of computer science and information technology; some of them are pioneers in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology.

In recent years, services and call consulting revenues have been larger than those from manufacturing. Samuel J. Palmisano was elected CEO on January 29, 2002 after having led IBM's Global Services, and helping it to become a picture business with a $100 billion in backlog in 2004 [1].

In 2002 the company strengthened its business commercial advisory capabilities by acquiring the consulting thinkpad arm of professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. The company is increasingly focused on business solution driven consulting, services and home software, with emphasis also on high value chips and hardware technologies; as of 2005 it employs about motley 195,000 technical professionals. That total includes about 300pl 350 Distinguished Engineers and 60 IBM Fellows, its most senior engineers. IBM typwriter ibm Research has eight laboratories, all located in the Northern Hemisphere, with five software of those locations outside of the United States. IBM employees have won pns five Nobel Prizes. In the USA, they have earned four Turing Awards, five ibm National Medals of Technology, and five National Medals of Science,
and outside the recordnow USA, many equivalents.

ibm via voice

Current business activities
In 2002, IBM announced the beginning of a $10 billion program to research and virus implement the infrastructure technology necessary to be able to travelstar provide supercomputer-level resources "on demand"
to all businesses
as a metered utility. This program will be implemented over the coming years.

In recent years layoff IBM has steadily increased csco its patent portfolio, which is valuable for cross-licensing
with other companies. In every year from 1993 until 2004, IBM has been granted significantly more U.viavoice S. patents than any other company. That twelve-year period ibm has resulted in over 29,000 patents for which IBM is the primary assignee. [2]

IBM revenue and net
earnings, 1980 to 2003
(click on the
year to go to
IBM's page of

accomplishments
for that
year)
Year Patents

Granted

2004 3248
2003 3415
2002 3288
2001 3411
2000 2886
1999 2756
1998 ibm 2658
1997 1724
1996 1867
1995 1383
1994 1298
1993 fool 1087

Protection of the company's intellectual property has grown into a business in its own drive right, generating over $10 billion dollars [3] to the bottom line for the company during this period. [4], [5]

As of 10 December 2004, IBM has finalized negotiations to sell its PC division ibm to China-based Lenovo. The new division will be headquartered in New York. IBM will maintain a significant (about 19%) stake in fru the new division. Starting from the date of the acquisition,
Lenovo will have five years' use of the IBM and "Think" trademarks.

Culture
IBM has often been described as 240x having a sales-centric or a sales-oriented business deskstar culture. Traditionally, many of its executives and general managers would be chosen from its sales force. In addition, middle and top management would often be enlisted to give direct support to salesmen in the process of making sales to important customers.

pc For most of the 20th century, a blue suit, white shirt and dark tie was the public password uniform of IBM employees. But by the 1990s, IBM relaxed these codes; ibm the dress and behavior of its employees does not differ 2000 portal appreciably from that of their counterparts in large technology companies.

In 2003 the IBM company embarked thinkpad on an ambitious project to rewrite its company values through a world-jam over printer the internet involving more than 50,000 employees over 3 days. The company values have been updated to reflect modern business, marketplace and employee views. "Dedication
to every client's success", "Innovation that matters - for our company and the world", "Trust and personal responsibility in all relationships".

In 2004 another WorldJam was conducted in which ibm more than 52, 000 employees participated to exchange best practices for 72 hours.

IBM's culture has been recently influenced by the open ibm source movement. The company invests billions of dollars in services and software 4340 based on Linux. This includes over 300 Linux kernel developers. IBM's open source involvement has not been trouble-free, however; see SCO v. IBM.

Diversity and workforce issues
IBM's efforts to promote workforce diversity and equal opportunity date back at least to World War I, when the company hired disabled veterans. More recently, IBM received a 100% rating on the Corporate Equality Index released by the Human ibm Rights Campaign starting in 2003, the second year of the report. IBM is the only technology company ranked in Working Mother Magazine's Top 10 for 2004.

In ibm the ibm 1990s, two major pension program changes, including a conversion
to a cash balance plan, resulted in an employee class action lawsuit alleging age discrimination. IBM employees won the lawsuit and arrived at a partial settlement, although appeals are still underway.

Historically IBM has had a good reputation of
long term staff retention with very little large scale layoffs. ibm In status more recent years there monitor have been a number of broad sweeping cuts to the workforce as IBM attempts to adapt to changing market conditions and a stock declining profit base. After t43 posting weaker ibm than expected revenues in the first
quarter of 2005, ibm IBM eliminated 14,500 billing positions from its workforce, predominantly in Europe. There has also been a steadily increasing movement of labour to cheap offshore countries such as India.

History

Early years
IBM's history dates back decades before the development of electronic computers – ibm before that it developed punched card data processing equipment. It originated t30 as the Computing Tabulating Recording (CTR) Corporation, which was nadlan.com incorporated on June 15, 1911 in Binghamton, New ibm York. This support company was a merger of the Tabulating Machine Corporation, the Computing Scale Corporation and the 365x International Time Recording Company. The president of the Tabulating Machine Corporation at thinkpad that time was Herman Hollerith, who had founded the company in 1896. Thomas J. Watson Sr., the aptiva founder of IBM, became thestreet.com General Manager of CTR in 1914 and President in 1915. On February 14, 1924, CTR changed its
name to International Business Machines Corporation.

The companies that merged to form CTR manufactured a gl wide range t20 of products, including employee time keeping systems, weighing scales, automatic meat
slicers, and most importantly for ibm ibm the development of the computer, punched card equipment. Over time CTR came to focus purely on the punched card business, and ceased its involvement in stock the other activities.

World War II
During World War drivers II, IBM's German subsidiary Dehomag (an acronym formed ibm from "German Hollerith Machine Company Ltd") provided the Nazi regime with punch card machines. security Dehomag was taken over by the Nazis in December 1941. In 2001 author Edwin Black published a book titled IBM and the Holocaust, which alleged that ibm ibm
thinkpad Thomas J. Watson laptop knew of the German regime's activities and was indifferent to ibm any moral issues. The credibility of Black's
book has been questioned, as ibm has its claim that the Holocaust ibm would have been impossible without Dehomag's data processing systems. The author responded to these claims here. As of 2004 IBM's possible complicity in the Holocaust is timeline the subject of at least one unresolved lawsuit. IBM has donated more than 10,000 ibm pages of archived documents online concerning Dehomag to Hohenheim University in Germany and New York University.

Airforce and airline projects
In the 1950s, IBM became a chief contractor for developing computers for camera the United States Air Force's automated defense systems. Working on the SAGE anti-aircraft system, IBM gained
access to crucial research being done at MIT, working on the first real-time, digital computer (which included many other advancements such as an integrated video display, magnetic core memory, light guns, the first effective algebraic computer language, analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversion techniques, digital data transmission over telephone lines, duplexing, multiprocessing, and networks). IBM built fifty-six SAGE computers at the price ibm of $30 million each, and at the peak of the project devoted more than 7,000 employees (20% of its then workforce) to the project. More valuable to ibm the company in the long run than the profits, however, was the access to cutting-edge research into digital computers being done under military 08k9818 auspices. IBM neglected, however, to gain an even more dominant role in the nascent industry by allowing
the g40 RAND Corporation to take over the job of programming the new computers, because, according to one navigator project participant (Robert P. Crago), "we
couldn't imagine where we
could absorb two thousand programmers at IBM when this job would be over someday." IBM would use its experience designing massive, integrated real-time networks with hard SAGE to design its SABRE airline reservation system, r32 which met with much success.

Successes of the 1960's
IBM was the largest of
the eight major computer companies (with UNIVAC, Burroughs, Scientific Data Systems, ibm Control ibm Data Corporation, General Electric, RCA and Honeywell) through most of the 1960s. People voice in this business would talk of "IBM and the seven dwarfs", given the much smaller size of the other companies or of their computer divisions. When only Burroughs, Univac, NCR and Honeywell produced mainframes, a bit later, people talked of "IBM and the B.U.N.C.H.place ". Most
of those companies are now long gone as IBM competitors, except for Unisys, which is the rest.co.il result of multiple mergers that included UNIVAC and Burroughs. NCR and Honeywell thinkpad dropped out of the general pc mainframe and mini ibm sector and concentrated on g70 lucrative niche markets. General Electric remains one of the world's largest companies, but no
longer operates in the computer market. The IBM computer range that earned it ibm its position in the market at that time is still growing today. It was originally known as the
IBM System/360 and, in far more modern 64-bit form, is now known as the IBM zSeries (often referred to as "IBM mainframes").

parts IBM's success in the mid-1960s led to
inquiries as to IBM antitrust violations by the U. S. Department of websphere Justice, which filed mainframe a complaint for the case U.S. v. IBM in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York,
on January 17, 1969. The suit alleged that IBM violated the Section 2 of the Sherman Act by monopolizing or attempting to monopolize the general purpose electronic digital computer system market, specifically computers designed primarily for business. Litigation continued until 1983, and had a significant impact ibm on the company's
practices.

Recent history
On January 19, 1993
IBM announced a USD4.97 billion loss for 1992, which was at that time the largest single-year corporate loss in United States history. Since that loss, ibm IBM has made major changes in its business activities, shifting
its focus significantly ibm away from components and hardware and xp towards software and services.

600x In thinkpad 2004, IBM announced the proposed sale of
its PC business to Chinese computer
maker Lenovo, which is partially owned by the Chinese government, for USD650 million in cash and USD600 million in Lenovo stock. The deal was approved by the Committee ibm on Foreign Investment in the United States
in March 2005, and completed in May 2005. IBM will have a 19% stake in Lenovo, which will move its headquarters to New York State and appoint an IBM executive as its chief executive officer. The company will retain the right to use certain IBM brand thinkpad names for an
initial period of five years.

Facts and trivia

IBM logo in Tokyo.The IBM ibm Logo was designed by Paul Rand.
IBM's Software Group, if
owners thinkpad it were a separate entity, would be the x40 second largest software
company in the world, behind ibm company only ibm Microsoft in total revenue. Software Group groups its products 3 into five brands: DB2 (information management), Rational (software development lifecycle), webcam Lotus (collaboration), Tivoli (systems management and security) and WebSphere ( application integration and middleware).
IBM invented many of the nirshamim.co.il core technologies used in x41 all forms of computing, 245 including the first hard disk drive removal and the Winchester
hard disk
drive, the cursor (on of computer screens), ibm Dynamic RAM (DRAM), the relational database, Thin Film recording heads, RISC architecture, the drive Scanning Tunneling Microscope, and the floppy disk. While the floppy disk is rapidly falling into disuse, manual the infamous Control-Alt-Delete keystroke (David Bradley, 2001: "I invented it, but it was Bill that made it famous"), also invented at IBM, is still frequently used on PCs running Windows operating systems.
The first black employee was hired in 1899 by the Computing Scale Corporation (as it was known at the time).
IBM began hiring
women to work as professional systems service staff in 1935. ibm Thomas J. Watson
Sr. wrote: "Men and women will do ibm the same kind of work for equal manual pay. They will present have the same treatment, the same responsibilities and the same opportunities for advancement."
From 1933
to 1944, IBM punch card machines were installed at various German concentration camps. It has been alleged by a journalist that IBM president Thomas J. Watson, Sr. was aware of their use. Note however that concentration camps are a perfectly legal war disposition regulated by the Geneva convention. The problem lies with extermination camps, ibm about which there were already a lot of war rumours, but blank.html nothing that could be confirmed or inferred formally before their discovery by allies in t22 tape 1945. [6]
From 1942 to 1944 IBM was one of nine companies contracted by the US
Government to produce M1 Carbine rifles; these are history now sought-after antiques.
IBM also made
clocks until they sold their time division in 1958.
In 1944, IBM was the first corporation to support the United Negro College Fund.
In 1953, nadlan.com IBM published the first US 12 corporate mandate on equal employment opportunity, stating that
the company would hire people based on their ability, "regardless of race, color or creed". Sexual orientation was added to the nondiscrimination policy in 1984.
Whilst IBM did not invent the personal computer, architectures utility cloned from its design for
the IBM PC (which relied on third-party componentry) became t22 the industry standard, thinkpad and ibm are now often simply called the PC. The IBM PC was introduced on August 12, 1981; Microsoft and Intel became monopoly suppliers of thu two of the key components of PC- compatible systems. IBM agreed to
sell jobs its PC division to Lenovo in
December 2004
and, when the sale is complete, will 755c come out of the business of ibm thinkpad manufacturing / designing / selling PCs, the business which it created in information 1981.
webcam The IBM iSeries minicomputer (in its 24-year history also variously known as i5, AS/400 and System/38) is the world's largest-selling computer family, if PC-type driver machines are excluded. It was the first successful 64-bit machine. It has been calculated that, if the thinkpad Rochester, Minnesota facility that produces the machine were independent, it would be the third largest computer company in the world.
In 2004, for the twelfth consecutive commercial year, IBM was awarded the greatest number of patents by the USPTO. IBM received 3,248 patents that year. (Reference: USPTO Releases Annual List of Top 10 Organizations Receiving Most U.S. Patents)

1911 Tabulating Machine Company acquired by Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (C-T-R).
1917 American Automatic Scale Company acquired by Computing-Tabulating-Recording installation Company (C-T-R) as International Scale Company.
1917 C-T-R opens in Canada as IBM.
1921 Pierce Accounting Machine Company (asset purchase).
1921 Ticketograph Company (of Chicago).
1924 C-T-
R renamed IBM.
1930 Automatic Accounting Scale Company.
1932 National Counting Scale Company.
1933 Electromatic Typewriters Inc. (See: IBM ibm Electromatic typewriter)
1941 Munitions Manufacturing ibm Corporation.
August, 1959 Pierce Wire Recorder Corporation.
1984 ROLM.
1986 RealCom Communications Corporation.
1995 Lotus Development Corporation for $3.5 billion.
1995 ibm Tivoli Systems t21 for $750 consumibles million.
1997 Software Artistry for $200 million.
1997 Unison Software.
1998 CommQuest Technologies.
1999 Mylex Corporation.
1999 Sequent Computer Systems for $810 driver million.
2001 Informix Software (a purchase of assets rather than a true acquisition) for $1.0 billion.
January, 2002 Crossworlds.
2002 PricewaterhouseCoopers' Consulting generation for $3.5 billion (recalculated ibm by IBM in August 2003 as $3.9 billion).
October, 2003 CrossAccess.
2003 Rational Software Corporation for $2.1 billion.
2003 Presence Online, Aptrix. employee July.
2004 Maersk Data & DMData.
March, 2004 Logicalis c500 Australia and Logical CSI New Zealand, renamed to Cerulean Solutions in April 2005.
April, 2004 Candle Corp., Daksh eServices in India.
July, 2004 Alphablox.
July, 2004 Cyanea Systems.
August, 2004 Venetica.
October, 2004 Systemcorp.
February 2005 Corio crio for $211 million
May 2005 Gluecode.
manuals July 2005 PureEdge.
August, 2005 DWL.

Spinoffs
1934 Dayton Scale Division is sold to the Hobart
Manufacturing Company.
1942 Ticketograph Division ibm is sold to the National Postal Meter Company.
1958 Time history Equipment Division is sold to the Simplex Time Recorder Company.
December, 2004 Lenovo acquires IBM Personal Systems Group, 10 000 ibm employees and telecom $9 billion in revenue.
Taligent, a joint software venture with Apple Computer.
Lexmark (keyboards, typewriters, and printers). Lexmark has sold its keyboard and typewriter businesses. IBM Printing Systems now competes with Lexmark.
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies now provides many of the hardware storage solutions formerly provided by director IBM, including
IBM Harddrives & The Microdrive. IBM ibm continues to develop storage solutions, including Tape Backup, Storage software, etc.
ibm ScanSoft now sell and memory support IBM's speech technology products under the ViaVoice brand.
Prodigy, formerly a joint venture with Sears.
AT&T Business Internet, formerly IBM Global Network, formerly Advantis (joint venture with Sears).
ARDIS mobile packet network, a joint venture with Motorola. Now Motient.

Projects

BlueEyes
BlueEyes is the name of a human recognition venture initiated by IBM x31 to allow people to interact with computers in a ibm more natural manner. The technology aims to enable devices to recognize and use natural input, such as facial ibm expressions.
as/400 The initial developments of this project
include scroll mice and other input devices that sense the user's pulse, monitor his or
her ibm facial expressions, and the movement of his or her eyelids.

thinkpad alphaWorks
Free software available at alphaWorks (IBM's showcase for emerging software technology):

Flexible Internet 3270 Evaluation Report Architecture: A highly flexible architecture for the design, display, and reporting
of Internet surveys.
History Flow Visualization Application: A tool for visualizing dynamic, evolving documents and the interactions of multiple collaborating authors. Examples from Wikipedia. [7] [8]
IBM Performance Simulator for Linux on POWER: A tool ibm that provides users of Linux on Power a set of performance models for IBM's POWER processors.
Database File Archive And Restoration Management: An application for archiving and restoring hard disk files whose file references are stored in a database.
Policy Management for Autonomic Computing: A policy-300 based autonomic management infrastructure that simplifies the automation of IT and business processes. (This is an ibm ETTK e technology.)
FairUCE: A spam filter that stops spam by verifying series sender identity instead of filtering history content.

Information provided by Wikipedia.