On June 16, 1911, IBM was born as a Computing-Tabulating-Recording company in Endicott.
International Business Machines, known as IBM and nicknamed “Big Blue,” is a multinational information technology and consulting corporation.
The company started in the 1890s, the time of the industrial revolution.
At the time, the US Census Bureau was having trouble tabulating the results.
That is why the agency decided to create a contest to find better methods than the traditional one.
The winner was Herman Hollerith, a German immigrant who brought out an electrically powered drilling machine to identify boreholes and total counts.
With the money raised from the prize, Hollerith founded a company in 1896 which he called the “Tabulating Machine”.
In 1911 the company merged with two other companies; Computing Scale America and International Time Recording.
The result of this combination gave rise to Computation-Tabulation-Record, that is, CTR.
The company dedicated itself to manufacturing and selling machines from commercial scales to cheese and meat slicers.
Headquartered in New York, CTR had 1,300 employees.
Subsequently, it had rapid growth in different markets, causing an excessive diversification of products.
To deal with this problem, the owners decide to seek help from the leadership of an executive from another company known as National Cash Register.
A 40-year-old man named Thomas Watson took over the company as general manager.
In 1924, to reflect the international growth of the company, the company name was changed to International Machines Corp, or IBM.
During the great depression of the 1930s, IBM was able to grow while the US economy was going through hard times.
Watson kept his workers busy while most companies went bankrupt.
IBM was also able to survive World War II.
All of IBM’s infrastructure was acquired to manufacture weapons for the United States government.
The war marked the first steps towards the area of computing at IBM.
In 1944 he created the Mark I, the first machine that could do calculations automatically.
In the early 1960s, IBM began to transform into a purely computing company.
In 1981, the IBM PC was created, the most successful personal computer of all time.
The company currently has more than 433,000 employees and is one of the largest and most profitable information technology companies in the world.
It has eleven laboratories and scientists, engineers, consultants and sales professionals in more than 170 countries.
On June 16, 1911, IBM was born as a Computing-Tabulating-Recording company in Endicott.
The story is also news on Radio Perfil. Voiceover by Pita Fortín and script by Sebastián Rojas.
by Radio Profile
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