IBM celebrates 100th birthday
Today marks the 100th birthday of IBM, which was founded on June 16, 1911, in New York City as the awkwardly named Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. (It was renamed International Business Machines in 1924.)
Over the decades, Big Blue, as the company is nicknamed, has reinvented itself many times, offering everything from calculators to electric typewriters to desktop computers to software to consulting services. By the mid-20th century, IBM was an icon of American business whose clean-cut employees in dark suits followed the mantra “Think,” a favorite slogan of longtime leader Thomas J. Watson.
Despite a somewhat stodgy reputation in recent years, IBM holds more patents than any other U.S.-based technology company and has a long history of pioneering technological innovations. IBM research has yielded the computerized airline reservation system, the magnetic strip on your credit cards, the ATM, the UPC bar code and the excimer laser used in LASIK eye surgery. IBM computers also helped power the Apollo moon landing in 1969....