International Business Machines Corporation

Place: Endicott

Born: 1911

Biography:

IBM, originally known as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR), was founded in 1911 in Endicott, New York. It was renamed to its current name in 1924 and became a leading manufacturer of punch-card tabulating systems. IBM's mainframe computers dominated the market during the 1960s and 1970s, with the company producing 80% of computers in the US and 70% worldwide. IBM entered the personal computer market in the 1980s with the IBM Personal Computer, which became widely popular and known as the PC. However, due to a lack of protection for its intellectual property, IBM lost its market dominance to emerging competitors. The company has since shifted its focus to computer services, software, supercomputers, and scientific research. IBM has been responsible for several technological innovations, including the automated teller machine (ATM), dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), the floppy disk, the hard disk drive, the magnetic stripe card, the relational database, the SQL programming language, and the UPC barcode. IBM is a publicly traded company and one of the world's largest employers, with over 297,900 employees worldwide in 2022. It is consistently ranked among the world's most recognizable and valuable brands.