Company
ActiveIBM
Armonk, New York · Since 1911
Still operating. The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company took the IBM name in 1924.
A later timeline chapter projects a role for this organization. That chapter is a projection. This page is about the institution as it exists, or as it existed.
The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company was formed in 1911 from firms that made scales, time clocks, and Herman Hollerith's punched-card machines. Thomas J. Watson Sr. took it over, and in 1924 renamed it International Business Machines. The product was the card. The business was the rent.
A company leased the machines and sold the cards. Clerks who had counted by hand became keypunch operators who prepared cards a sorter could read. IBM did not invent the office. It mechanized the part of the office that was already a procedure.
From cards to systems
Watson built a sales force with a code of dress and a company song, and a service force that kept the machines running because a stopped sorter stopped the client's payroll. During and after the war, IBM moved into electronic computers without abandoning the lease. The System/360, announced in 1964, was a family of compatible machines. A customer could grow without throwing away the programs. That compatibility employed a new mass occupation: the programmer who wrote for one architecture and expected it to last.
Still the company, not the monopoly
The personal computer, including the IBM PC of 1981, ended the assumption that computing meant a glass room and a lease. IBM sold the PC division to Lenovo in 2005 and bet on services and software. It is still independent, still in Armonk, and still a large employer of engineers and consultants. The keypunch operator is gone. The company that hired her is not. Later timeline chapters that mention IBM and quantum machines are projections. This page is not.
The work it organized
- Keypunch operator
- Customer engineer
- Systems programmer
- Salesman
On the timeline
Related
- Remington RandAbsorbed