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Sunday 16 August 2015

IBM

IBM began as the Computer Tabulating Recording Company in 1914. It changed its name to International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) on February 14, 1924.  

Dehomag, a German subsidiary of IBM, was the main provider of computing equipment in Nazi Germany. It provided the German government with machines to conduct censuses and gave the Nazis a way of tracing Jews. The technology was used by the Gestapo to locate and arrest its victims.

The Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (known best as the Harvard Mark I) was the first program-controlled calculator. It was developed and built by IBM at their Endicott plant and shipped to Harvard in February 1944. The ASCC began computations for the U.S. Navy Bureau of Ships in May and was officially presented to the university on August 7, 1944.

The ASCC By Original uploader was Daderot at en.wikipedia 

IBM boasted in 1952 that each of their computers were equivalent to having 150 extra engineers with slide rules .

The name of HAL, the shipboard computer in 2001: a Space Odyssey, is simply an acronym made of IBM's preceding letters.

On June 23, 1969, IBM announced that it would begin pricing its software and services separately from its hardware. This was a major change in the way software was sold, and it had a profound impact on the software industry. Prior to this announcement, software was typically bundled with hardware, and customers had no choice but to buy the software if they wanted to use the hardware. This made it difficult for independent software vendors to compete with IBM, as they had to sell their software at a lower price than IBM in order to be competitive.

IBM's decision to price its software separately from its hardware changed all of that. Now, customers could buy the software they wanted from any vendor, and they could choose to buy the hardware from a different vendor. This gave independent software vendors a much fairer playing field, and it led to the growth of the modern software industry.

The IBM Personal Computer was introduced on August 12, 1981. Pricing for the IBM model number 5150 started at US$1,565 (equivalent to $4,073 in 2015) for a configuration with 16K RAM, Color Graphics Adapter, and no disk drives.

IBM Personal Computer model 5150 with monochrome phosphor monitor and IBM PC keyboard. By Ruben de Rijcke

Apple ran a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal in 1981 welcoming IBM to the desktop computer market. Even though IBM would become Apple's biggest competitor, Apple felt that IBM's entry into the PC market would legitimize the industry and ultimately help Apple.

IBM announced a loss of $4.97 billion for 1992. It was the largest single-year loss in U.S. corporate history.

IBM made the first smartphone in 1994. The device had a touchscreen display input and could send emails and run third party apps.

In 2012 IBM was the second-largest firm in the US in terms of staff.

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