60 Fun Facts About IBM

What do the letters IBM stand for?

The name had first been used by the company's Canadian division before it was adopted for the whole firm in 1924.

What is IBM's long-standing nickname?

It comes partly from the blue logo and partly from the old dress code of white shirts and blue suits.

Where is IBM headquartered?

The company operates in over 175 countries and is one of the 30 stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

Under what name was IBM founded in 1911?

Charles Ranlett Flint merged four companies making scales, time clocks, tabulators and meat slicers.

In which year was CTR renamed International Business Machines?

Thomas Watson Sr. hated the clumsy hyphenated name.

Which inventor's electric tabulating machine, patented in 1889, is a founding technology of IBM?

His punched-card machines cut the processing of the 1890 US census from eight years to six.

From which company had Thomas J. Watson Sr. been fired before joining CTR in 1914?

He brought NCR's sales conventions, dark-suited salesmen and evangelical company pride with him.

What one-word slogan did Thomas Watson Sr. make IBM's mantra?

He had coined it at NCR in 1911; it lives on in the ThinkPad name.

What controversial medal did Watson Sr. receive from Hitler's government at a 1937 Berlin trade congress?

Critics linked it to the punched-card machines IBM's subsidiary Dehomag supplied for Nazi censuses; Watson later returned it.

What was IBM's majority-owned German subsidiary, whose machines the Nazis used, called?

Edwin Black's 2001 book IBM and the Holocaust documented the relationship.

What weapon did IBM manufacture as a war contractor between 1943 and 1944?

It made about 346,500 of them, 6% of all those used in the war.

The Harvard Mark I of 1944, built with IBM, was also known by what IBM name?

John von Neumann ran Manhattan Project calculations on the 51-foot machine.

What was IBM's first commercial scientific computer, announced in 1952?

Known as the Defense Calculator during development, it used vacuum tubes.

Which storage technology did the IBM 305 RAMAC introduce in 1956?

Its IBM 350 unit held data on fifty 24-inch disks, weighed about a ton and leased for $3,200 a month.

How much data did the IBM 350 storage unit of 1956 hold?

That was 5 million six-bit characters; it had to be moved by forklift.

Which programming language, announced by IBM in 1957, was created by John Backus's team for the IBM 704?

The name comes from Formula Translation; the first compiler was delivered in April 1957.

By the mid-1960s, roughly what share of the world's computers were IBM 1401-type systems?

More than 10,000 were installed at the peak.

For which airline did IBM build SABRE, the computerised booking service launched in 1964?

The idea came from a chance meeting between an IBM salesman and the airline's boss on a 1953 flight.

What did IBM's Selectric typewriter of 1961 use instead of individual typebars?

Designed by Eliot Noyes, it captured 75% of the US business electric typewriter market.

On 7 April 1964 IBM launched which family of compatible computers, called its five-billion-dollar gamble?

Gene Amdahl was chief architect and Fred Brooks managed the project.

Who was the chief architect of the 1964 mainframe family?

Brooks managed the project and later wrote The Mythical Man-Month about it.

Thomas Watson Jr., who bet the company on the 1964 mainframe family, later served as US ambassador where?

Fortune called him 'the greatest capitalist in history'.

Roughly what share of computers worldwide did IBM produce in the 1960s and 1970s?

It made 80 percent of those in the United States.

Which IBM researcher's 1970 paper introduced the relational model that underlies modern databases?

He won the 1981 Turing Award; SQL grew out of his work.

What size were the first floppy disks, invented by IBM in 1971?

The 5¼ and 3½-inch formats came later.

What was the first UPC-barcoded item scanned at a checkout, in Troy, Ohio, in 1974?

IBM's George Laurer designed the UPC symbol; the gum was scanned at 8:01 a.m. on 26 June 1974.

Which graphic designer created IBM's eight-bar logo in 1972?

It replaced a 13-bar version because photocopiers of the day could not render the narrow stripes.

On what date was the IBM Personal Computer released?

It was built in Boca Raton, Florida, around an Intel 8088 and an open architecture.

Which processor powered the original IBM PC?

Its open architecture let clone makers copy the design; the first legal clone appeared within a year.

What was the starting price of the IBM PC in 1981?

That bought 16 KB of RAM, a keyboard and no disk drives.

Which silent-film character was licensed for the IBM PC's advertising campaign?

Actor Billy Scudder played him in the ads.

Which OS did IBM develop jointly with Microsoft in 1985?

The partnership later soured as Microsoft backed Windows instead.

What record did IBM set in 1993?

Lou Gerstner was hired from RJR Nabisco to turn the company around.

Lou Gerstner, who ran IBM from 1993 to 2002, wrote a memoir of the turnaround with what title?

He came to IBM from RJR Nabisco and had earlier been at American Express and McKinsey.

Which IBM device from 1994 is often called the first smartphone?

Sold by BellSouth for $899 with a contract, it had a touchscreen and could send faxes and email.

Which world chess champion did IBM's Deep Blue defeat in a 1997 rematch?

Deep Blue won 3½-2½ after losing the 1996 match; it could evaluate 200 million positions a second.

Under what earlier name did the Kasparov-beating chess project arrive at IBM before being renamed in 1989?

Feng-hsiung Hsu designed the customised RS/6000 SP supercomputer.

Which two champions did IBM's Watson beat on Jeopardy! in 2011?

Watson finished with $77,147 and took the $1 million first prize.

What famous wrong answer did Watson give in the Final Jeopardy 'US Cities' category?

It added five question marks to signal low confidence; the correct response was Chicago.

To which Chinese company did IBM sell its PC business, including the ThinkPad, in 2005?

Lenovo paid $1.25 billion and took on $500 million of debt.

How much did IBM pay for the open-source software company Red Hat, in a deal completed in 2019?

It was the largest acquisition in IBM's history, championed by Arvind Krishna.

What is Kyndryl?

It started with 90,000 employees and 4,600 clients in 115 countries.

Who became the first woman to lead IBM when she took over as CEO in 2012?

She joined IBM as a systems engineer in 1981 and later became the third female member of Augusta National.

Who became IBM's CEO in April 2020?

He had been a principal architect of the Red Hat deal.

For how many straight years, ending in 2021, did IBM hold the record for most annual US patents?

It is the largest industrial research organisation in the world, with 19 labs in a dozen countries.

In 1990 IBM scientists spelled out the company's initials with 35 xenon atoms using which instrument?

It was the first structure ever assembled one atom at a time; the microscope itself won IBM's Binnig and Rohrer a Nobel Prize in 1986.

For what discovery did IBM Zurich's Bednorz and Müller win the 1987 Physics Nobel?

Leo Esaki (1973) and Binnig and Rohrer (1986) were IBM's other physics laureates.

How many Nobel Prizes have been won by IBM employees and alumni?

They have also collected six Turing Awards.

Which IBM supercomputer project won the 2009 National Medal of Technology and Innovation?

It began in 1999 as a $100 million effort aimed at protein folding.

Which space programme's guidance computers and Saturn V Instrument Unit did IBM build?

IBM also took part in the 1965 Gemini flights.

Which of these was NOT invented at IBM?

The transistor came from Bell Labs; IBM's list also includes DRAM, the ATM, the hard disk and SQL.

In which New York town was CTR, the future IBM, based when it was formed in 1911?

The five merged companies had 1,300 employees.

What is Thomas Watson Sr.'s often-quoted 1943 prediction that there is scant evidence he ever made?

The line is repeated endlessly but poorly sourced.

What did IBM begin spinning off in 1991, in units nicknamed 'Baby Blues'?

The aim was to make the sprawling company more manageable.

Lotus Development, bought by IBM in 1995, was best known for which product?

The purchase came two years after IBM's record $8 billion loss and Lou Gerstner's arrival to turn the company around.

Which business did IBM announce it was exiting in June 2020?

CEO Arvind Krishna wrote to Congress calling for a national dialogue on police use of the technology.

From which company was Lou Gerstner hired as IBM's CEO in 1993?

He arrived just after IBM posted what was then the biggest loss in American corporate history.

Which data-infrastructure company did IBM agree to buy for about $11 billion in December 2025?

The deal closed in March 2026 and followed the purchase of Software AG's StreamSets and webMethods platforms.

Which IBM researcher programmed a computer in 1956 to learn checkers from its own experience?

Working at the Poughkeepsie lab, he produced what is often called the first practical demonstration of artificial intelligence.

To which private equity firm did IBM agree to sell Watson Health in January 2022?

Weeks later CEO Arvind Krishna announced IBM had suspended all business in Russia after the invasion of Ukraine.