IBM
More info
- Founded
- (as CTR)
- Headquarters
- Armonk, New York
- Type
- Technology corporation
- Website
- ibm.com
The industry's oldest giant — punch cards, mainframes, the personal computer, and a capacity to survive every technology shift that has made it the sector's answer to a continental plate.
Formed in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company and renamed International Business Machines in 1924. The System/360 of 1964 was the bet that nearly sank the company and then defined the mainframe: a family of machines sharing one architecture, so programs could move between models. Eight bits to the byte became standard there.
The IBM PC in 1981 created an entire industry — but the company outsourced the processor to Intel and the operating system to Microsoft without exclusivity, which made compatible clones possible and handed the market away. Its centre of gravity today is services, mainframes and cloud; Red Hat was bought in 2019 and HashiCorp in 2025.