International Business Machines

Originally a time clock company. Ruled the world BeforeMicrosoft. The founder started out by using the HollerithPunchCard, and selling related machines to computer makers, and later starting building whole computers under the new name IBM.

Actually, HermanHollerith? invented PunchedCards while working for the US Census Bureau, then started his own company to commercialise it, and that was then, 30 years later. Bought by BigBlue.

• Badly wrong. Hollerith merely adapted the punched card for data processing; it was invented 150 years earlier to control Jacquard Looms, and used in 1830 by none other than Babbage. See e.g. http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/jacquard.html

See InterstellarBureauofMagicians for whimsy.

Company slogan: THINK.

• Rumour has it that large signs were put up in the workplace saying THINK, but that these were all removed when hand written notes were put underneath saying "or thwim".

Realized early on that text manipulation would be a big use of computers, not just numeric calculations, but then they went sadly astray. -- RobertField

IBM pages on Wiki:

• IbmCorporation
• IbmDoubleDispatchPatent
• IbmEnterpriseComputing
• IbmIms
• IbmManagementGame
• IbmPollyannaPrinciple
• IbmSanFrancisco
• IbmSmalltalk
• IbmSystemThreeSixty
• PliLanguage
• RpgLanguage
• ScoVsIbm
• WardAtIbm

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Most well-known trivia among computer professionals: the letters in "IBM" each succeed the letters in "HAL" (the computer in 2001: A SpaceOdyssey).

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CategoryComputerCompany