57 Fun Facts About IBM

What do the letters IBM stand for?

International Business Machines: under Thomas J. Watson Sr., the company's revenue doubled within four years of his arrival.

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?

Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company: the financier Charles Ranlett Flint engineered the 1911 merger that created it.

Where was the IBM name used before the company adopted it in 1924?

Canada: once the company had expanded abroad, Watson took that more expansive name for the whole firm.

Which inventor's punched-card census machine, patented in 1889, is a founding technology of IBM?

Herman Hollerith: the Census Office leased a fleet of his machines, and the 1890 count finished months ahead of schedule and under budget.

At which company did Thomas J. Watson Sr. spend over a decade in sales before joining IBM's forerunner in 1914?

National Cash Register: he and other executives there were convicted over anti-competitive sales practices, but the verdict was overturned in 1915.

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

THINK: Watson had used the motto before joining IBM, and IBM's THINK-stamped notepads later inspired the name of the ThinkPad laptop.

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

The Order of the German Eagle: Watson later sent the medal back to Germany, in 1940.

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

Dehomag: its punch-card machines processed Nazi censuses, including the 1939 count that recorded who was Jewish.

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

The M1 Carbine rifle: Thomas Watson Sr. capped IBM's profit on war products at 1% and put it into a fund for widows and orphans of IBM war casualties.

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

Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator: after it reached Harvard in 1944, it spent the rest of the war computing for the US Navy.

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

The IBM 701: work on it began after the Korean War broke out, and it was known as the Defense Calculator during development.

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

The hard disk drive: RAMAC let businesses reach any record directly for real-time accounting, and every hard disk since descends from it.

How many characters could the IBM 350 storage unit of 1956 hold?

5 million: a RAMAC computer using this unit later handled the data processing at the 1960 Winter Olympics.

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

FORTRAN: Backus, frustrated by the complexity and cost of programming, later said much of his work came from being lazy.

About how many IBM 1401 computers were installed at its mid-1960s peak?

About 10,000: IBM had received 5,200 orders in the first five weeks, more than it had forecast for the machine's whole life.

For which airline did IBM build SABRE, the computerised booking system?

American Airlines: the project grew from a chance 1953 flight on which IBM salesman Blair Smith sat beside the airline's president, C. R. Smith.

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

A rotating 'golf ball' element: typists could swap in a different ball to change fonts, even within the same document.

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

System/360: the bet paid off quickly, and its design became a de facto standard for the whole industry.

Who was the chief architect of IBM's 1964 mainframe family?

Gene Amdahl: he later left IBM and founded Amdahl Corporation, which sold cheaper mainframes that could run IBM's software.

Thomas Watson Jr., who bet IBM on its 1964 mainframe family, later served as US ambassador to which country?

The Soviet Union: in retirement he pressed for nuclear arms reduction, and Jimmy Carter sent him to Moscow as ambassador in 1979.

What nickname did IBM's much smaller 1960s mainframe rivals, such as Burroughs, UNIVAC and Honeywell, share?

Seven Dwarfs: after GE and RCA quit computers, the five survivors became known by their initials as the BUNCH.

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

Edgar F. Codd: IBM was slow to build on his model, and Larry Ellison's Oracle beat IBM to market with a relational database.

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

8 inches: IBM designed it as a way to load instructions into its machines.

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

A pack of Juicy Fruit gum: its barcode used IBM engineer George Laurer's design of bars, chosen over a bull's-eye symbol that smeared in printing.

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

Paul Rand: he split the letters into horizontal lines to make IBM's mark look more dynamic.

What did IBM's Boca Raton team build the first IBM PC from?

Off-the-shelf parts: though IBM had designed and made nearly everything it sold, the team used other makers' parts and published the specifications.

Which processor powered the original IBM PC?

Intel 8088: the same chip went into many IBM-compatible clones, and those rivals soon eroded IBM's hold on the PC market.

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

Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp: IBM's ad agency wanted a simple, friendly Everyman, under the theme Keeping Up With Modern Times.

Which operating system did IBM and Microsoft agree in 1985 to develop together?

OS/2: the partners fell out in 1990, IBM carried on alone, and OS/2 lost the market to Microsoft's Windows.

As IBM's losses mounted, which chief executive was forced to announce his resignation in January 1993?

John Akers: to replace him, IBM turned to Lou Gerstner, an outsider to the computer business.

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

Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: on taking charge in 1993, he famously said the last thing IBM needed right now was a vision.

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

The IBM Simon: BellSouth sold about 50,000 at $899 with a contract, before IBM and BellSouth dropped the phone.

Which world chess champion did an IBM computer defeat in a 1997 rematch?

Garry Kasparov: he had beaten the machine 4–2 in 1996, and after losing the rematch he accused IBM of cheating.

Under what name did IBM's future champion-beating chess machine arrive from Carnegie Mellon before being renamed in 1989?

Deep Thought: IBM hired its creators, Feng-hsiung Hsu and Murray Campbell, in 1989 to build a machine that could defeat a world champion.

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

Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter: Jennings joked that quiz show contestant may be the first job made redundant by Watson, but not the last.

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

What is Toronto?: after the blunder, an IBM engineer wore a Toronto Blue Jays jacket to the taping of the second match.

To which Chinese company did IBM sell its PC business in 2005?

Lenovo: PCs had become a commodity, and IBM saw its future in more profitable software and larger computers.

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

$34bn: IBM pledged to preserve Red Hat's independence and neutrality, and runs it as a separate subsidiary.

Which part of IBM's business did Kyndryl take over when IBM spun it off in 2021?

Its infrastructure services: IBM spun them off to sharpen its own focus on hybrid cloud and AI.

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

Ginni Rometty: in 2014 she struck a deal for Apple to build apps for IBM's business customers.

Which film computer's name has long been rumoured to be a coded dig at IBM?

HAL 9000: fans noticed the name is IBM shifted back one letter, but the film's makers always denied it meant anything.

Which computer memory technology was invented at IBM in 1966?

Dynamic RAM (DRAM): IBM's Robert Dennard came up with the idea one evening while lying on his living room couch.

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

A scanning tunneling microscope: Don Eigler used its tip to drag the xenon atoms one at a time across a chilled nickel surface.

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

High-temperature superconductivity: their 1986 find in a ceramic oxide set off a rush in which hundreds of labs worldwide studied similar materials.

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

Blue Gene: IBM began it in 1999 as a $100 million effort to simulate protein folding, which is where the Gene in its name comes from.

IBM built the Instrument Unit, a ring of guidance computers and sensors, for which NASA rocket?

Saturn V: when lightning struck Apollo 12 twice just after launch, the ring's guidance kept the rocket on course.

Which card technology did IBM engineer Forrest Parry invent?

The magnetic stripe: Parry could not make the tape stick to the card until his wife, who was ironing, suggested melting it on with the iron.

Where in New York did IBM's forerunner set up its headquarters after the 1911 merger?

Endicott: the plant there began by making time clocks and went on to build IBM computers in the 1950s.

What did Thomas Watson Sr. supposedly predict in 1943, a quote with scant evidence behind it?

Just five computers would ever sell: the line may garble Watson Jr.'s 1953 report that IBM expected five orders for a new computer and got 18.

What did IBM begin splitting up in 1991?

Its many divisions into autonomous subsidiaries: printer unit Lexmark was sold off, but Lou Gerstner reversed the break-up plan after arriving in 1993.

Lotus Development, bought by IBM in 1995, first made its name with which 1983 best-seller?

The 1-2-3 spreadsheet: it became a killer app for the IBM PC, the kind of program people bought the computer to run.

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

Facial recognition: in a letter to Congress, CEO Arvind Krishna called for a national dialogue on whether police should use the technology.

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

RJR Nabisco: once at IBM, he made e-business the company's growth strategy.

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

Confluent: its founders had built the Apache Kafka data-streaming software at LinkedIn, then formed the company to commercialize it.

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

Arthur L. Samuel: his program improved by playing thousands of games against itself, a process he named machine learning.

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

Francisco Partners: it relaunched the business as Merative, and in 2023 IBM agreed to sell it The Weather Company as well.