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http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240059261/How-IBM-and-the-PC-changed-the-world

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http://all-that-is-interesting.com/ibm-nazis-ww2

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Today in 1924, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) changed it name to International Business Machines Corporation (IBM). IBM was first used for CTR's subsidiaries in Canada and South America, but after "several years of persuading a slow-moving board of directors," Thomas and Marva Belden note in The Lengthening Shadow, Thomas J. Watson Sr. succeeded in applying it to the entire company: " International to represent its big aspirations and Business Machines to evade the confines of the office appliance industry." As Kevin Maney observes in The Maverick and His Machine, IBM "was still an upstart little company" in 1924, when "revenues climbed to $11 million - not quite back to 1920 levels. (An $11 million company in 1924 was equivalent to a company in 2001 with revenues of $113 million...)."

The upstart, according to Watson, was going to live forever. From a talk he gave at the first meeting of IBM's Quarter Century Club (people who have served the company for 25 years), on June 21, 1924: "The opportunities of the future are bound to be greater than those of the past, and to the possibilities of this business there is no limit so long as it holds the loyal cooperation of men and women like yourselves."

And in January 1926, at the One Hundred Percent Club Convention:

"This business has a future for your sons and grandsons and your great-grandsons, because it is going on forever. Nothing in the world will ever stop it. The IBM is not merely an organization of men; it is an institution that will go on forever. "

Today, Watson - an IBM computer system in development for the last seven years - is going to compete on the quiz show Jeopardy.

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This Day in Information: Watson Renames CTR as IBM

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Today in 1924, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) changed it name to International Business Machines Corporation (IBM). IBM was first used for CTR's subsidiaries in Canada and South America, but after "several years of persuading a slow-moving board of directors," Thomas and Marva Belden note in The Lengthening Shadow, Thomas J.

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https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/builders/builders_flint.html

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Charles R. Flint was the founder of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, the forerunner of IBM.

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Charles R. Flint was the founder of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, the forerunner of IBM.

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IBM Revenues and Net Income (Profit) During World War II

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This chart shows the gain in revenue and flattening of IBM profits during World War II

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Google, Apple and Facebook get all the attention. But the forgettable everyday tasks of technology - saving a file on your laptop, swiping your ATM card to get 40 bucks, scanning a gallon of milk at the checkout line - that's all IBM.

International Business Machines turns 100 on Thursday without much fanfare. But its much younger competitors owe a lot to Big Blue.

After all, where would Groupon be without the supermarket bar code? Or Google without the mainframe computer?

"They were kind of like a cornerstone of that whole enterprise that has become the heart of the computer industry in the U.S.," says Bob Djurdjevic, a former IBM employee and president of Annex Research.

IBM dates to June 16, 1911, when three companies that made scales, punch-clocks for work and other machines merged to form the Computing Tabulating Recording Co. The modern-day name followed in 1924.

With a plant in Endicott, N.Y., the new business also made cheese slicers and - significantly for its future - machines that read data stored on punch cards. By the 1930s, IBM's cards were keeping track of 26 million Americans for the newly launched Social Security program.

These old, sprawling machines might seem quaint in the iPod era, but they had design elements similar to modern computers. They had places for data storage, math processing areas and output, says David A. Mindell, professor of the history of technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Punch cards carted from station to station represented what business today might call "data flow."

"It was very sophisticated," Mindell says.

The force behind IBM's early growth was Thomas J. Watson Sr., a demanding boss with exacting standards for everything from office wear (white shirts, ties) to creativity (his slogan: "Think").

Watson, and later his son, Thomas Watson Jr., guided IBM into the computer age. Its machines were used to calculate everything from banking transactions to space shots. As the company swelled after World War II, IBM threw its considerable resources at research to maintain its dominance in the market for mainframes, the hulking computers that power whole offices.

"When we did semiconductors, we had thousands and thousands of people," says Donald Seraphim, who worked at IBM from 1957 until 1986 and was named a fellow, the company's highest honor for technical achievement. "They just know how to put the force behind the entrepreneurial things."

By the late '60s, IBM was consistently the only high-tech company in the Fortune 500's top 10. IBM famously spent $5 billion during the decade to develop a family of computers designed so growing businesses could easily upgrade.

It introduced the magnetic hard drive in 1956 and the floppy disk in 1971. In the 1960s, IBM developed the first bar code, paving the way for automated supermarket checkouts. IBM introduced a high-speed processing system that allowed ATM transactions. It created magnetic strip technology for credit cards.

For much of the 20th century, IBM was the model of a dominant, paternalistic corporation. It was among the first to give workers paid holidays and life insurance.

It ran country clubs for employees generations before Google offered subsidized massages and free meals.

"The model really was you joined IBM and you built your career for life there," says David Finegold, dean of the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University. Transfers to other cities were still common enough that employees joked IBM really stood for "I've Been Moved."

The origins of the company's nickname, Big Blue, are something of a mystery. It may simply derive from IBM's global size and the color of its logo.

IBM's gold-plated reputation was based in part on ubiquity and reliability, as well as a relentless sales force. But its fortunes began to change as bureaucracy stifled innovation. Information-technology managers used to joke that nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. But by the 1980s, Big Blue found itself adrift in a changing technology environment.

IBM had slipped with the rise of cheap microprocessors and rapid changes in the industry. In an infamous blunder, IBM introduced its influential personal computer in 1981, but it passed on buying the rights to the software that ran it - made by a startup called Microsoft.

IBM helped make the PC a mainstream product, but it quickly found itself outmatched in a market it helped create. It relied on Intel for chips and Microsoft for software, leaving it vulnerable when the PC industry took off and rivals began using the same technology.

The PC's casing wasn't as important as the technology inside it, and IBM didn't own the intellectual property inside its own machines. In addition, the rise of smaller computers that performed some of the same functions as mainframes threw IBM's main moneymaking business into disarray.

With its legacy and very survival at stake, the company was forced to embark on a wrenching restructuring.

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One of its major achievements turned out to be re-engineering itself during the upheavals of the 1990s. Viewed as too bureaucratic to compete in fast-changing times, IBM tapped an outsider as CEO in 1993 to help with a turnaround.

Louis Gerstner, a former executive with American Express and RJR Nabisco, had little knowledge of technology or IBM culture. In his first meeting with top IBM executives, he was the only one in the room with a blue shirt.

But he broke up old fiefdoms, slashed prices and eliminated jobs. IBM, which had peaked at 406,000 employees in 1985, shed more than 150,000 in the 1990s as the company lost nearly $16 billion over five years.

Gerstner resisted pressure to break up the company and instead focused on services, such as data storage and technical support. Services could be sold as an add-on to companies that had already bought IBM computers. Even barely profitable pieces of hardware were used to open the door to more profitable deals.

The shift allowed IBM to ride out two recessions: When times are tough, businesses pay IBM to help them find ways to cut costs and handle technology chores that would be more expensive to perform in-house.

The change in strategy was risky for a company that helped create the PC industry, yet IBM rose to become the world's biggest technology services provider.

With around $100 billion in annual revenue today, IBM is ranked 18th in the Fortune 500. It's three times the size of Google and almost twice as big as Apple. Its market capitalization of around $200 billion beats Google and allowed IBM last month to briefly surpass its old nemesis, Microsoft.

Cosmic Blog: Where IBM sees itself in the next 100 years

(Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

Though transformed, IBM remains a pioneer, the envy of the technology industry. Hewlett-Packard Co.'s new CEO, Leo Apotheker, says one of his primary goals is to strengthen the company's software and services businesses to compete better with IBM.

Some things haven't changed. The company still spends heavily on research, about $6 billion a year. It still comes up with flashy feats of computing prowess, most recently when its Watson computer system handily defeated the world's best "Jeopardy!" players.

And, just as in 1911, it's still in the business of finding data solutions.

While IBM's Watson attracted buzz by beating two human "Jeopardy!" champions, the company wants to put it to real-world use as a medical diagnostic tool that can understand plain language and analyze mountains of information. That's in line with IBM's focus on other big data projects, such as analyzing traffic patterns citywide to predict and stave off traffic jams.

The company that built its success making sense of millions of punch card records sees future innovations in the analysis of the billions and billions of bits of data being transmitted in the 21st century.

"The scale of that enables you to do discovery, whether it's in the case of drugs, medicine, crime - you name it," says Bernard Meyerson, IBM's vice president for innovation.

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For tech pioneer IBM, 100 years of 'Think'

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Google, Apple and Facebook get all the attention. But the forgettable everyday tasks of technology - saving a file on your laptop, swiping your ATM card to get 40 bucks, scanning a gallon of milk at the checkout line - that's all IBM. International Business Machines turns 100 on Thursday without much fanfare.

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http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/founded/

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1935: The U.S. adopts Social Security and IBM's punched card machines to help with the massive record keeping required to keep tabs on tens of millions of Americans.

1939: International Business Machines sponsors art at the 1939 World's Fair.

1942: IBM becomes involved in the war effort, helping keep track of vital statistics. Below, we see an IBM tabulating machine below used in keeping track of freight traffic in the country.

1944: IBM co-develops its first computer, the Automated Sequence Controlled Calculator aka Mark I, with Harvard University. It was used by the Navy to calculate gun trajectories.

1946: IBM provides a translation system for the Nuremberg trials.

1952: This was the Golden Age of IBM. Thomas J. Watson, Jr., became the president of the company, marking, by the company's own reckoning, the beginning of its time as a modern corporation.

1956: During this period, IBM made a number of important electronic advancements. Below, you can see the first commercial hard disk drive, the 350 RAMAC Disk Storage Unit, which was a major component of the groundbreaking 305 RAMAC computer.

1960: IBM employs 100,000 people. During this period, IBM made and sold massive computers to large governments and corporations. Computers were not yet devices for regular people. In 1964, MIT's Martin Greenberger took to the pages of this magazine to extoll the widespread use of computers ... and there were only 20,000!

Only a decade ago, in 1954, a UNIVAC was delivered to the General Electric Company in Louisville for business use. Up to that point, computers had been applied almost exclusively to scientific calculation. Quickly, payroll, inventory, and customer accounting became fair game. Today there are probably more than twenty thousand computers in use within the United States, and correspondingly large numbers are installed in many other countries around the world.

1968: Charles and Ray Eames put out " Powers of 10," a film about "the effect of adding another zero." Fundamentally about scale, it arrived on the scene at the tail end of the post-war boom, a period in which American industry basically did add another zero, growing and globalizing. IBM's computers helped businesses both manage and produce massive amounts of data, thereby assuring that ever more powerful machines would be needed to keep up with both sides of the information problem.

1980: Microsoft and IBM sign a deal to put the former's operating system on IBM computers.

1981: The IBM Personal Computer 5150 debuts, a landmark in the transition of computing from the province of the military and big government to everyday people.

1985: IBM clones permeate the market. Without really trying to, IBM-compatible comes to mean "every personal computer not produced by Apple." Though the company was losing marketshare in desktop computing, it was still setting the agenda including the use of Microsoft's operating system, MS-DOS.

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IBM's First 100 Years: A Heavily Illustrated Timeline

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1935: The U.S. adopts Social Security and IBM's punched card machines to help with the massive record keeping required to keep tabs on tens of millions of Americans. 1939: International Business Machines sponsors art at the 1939 World's Fair. 1942: IBM becomes involved in the war effort, helping keep track of vital statistics.