10 Companies that Changed the World
9. IBM
The International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation, with headquarters in Armonk, New York. IBM manufactures and markets computer hardware and software, and offers infrastructure, hosting, and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology.
In the 1880s, four technologies emerged that would ultimately form the core of what would become International Business Machines (IBM): Julius E. Pitrat patented the computing scale in 1885, Alexander Dey invented the dial recorder (1888), Herman Hollerith patented the Electric Tabulating Machine, and Willard Bundy invented a time clock to record a worker’s arrival and departure time on a paper tape in 1889.
IBM changed the way we process data forever. The company was a pioneer in the artificial intelligence field, programming computers to learn from their own experience. In 1957, the FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation) scientific programming language was developed. In 1963, IBM employees and computers helped NASA track the orbital flight of the Mercury astronauts. IBM continued its support of space exploration, enabling the 1965 Gemini flights, 1966 Saturn flights, and 1969 lunar mission.
IBM developed the first ever computer machine, the revolutionary IBM System/360. IBM was behind the Universal Product Code and a barcode reader, which would become the backbone of retail industry. IBM is one of the most innovative companies in the world. Famous IBM inventions that revolutionized the world include the ATM, floppy disk, hard disk drive, electronic keypunch, magnetic stripe card, virtual machine, scanning tunneling microscope, relational database, airline reservation system, dynamic random access memory (DRAM), and artificial intelligence.
