History It all started with a survey... Goto Bottom 1890 The 1880 census took 7 years to complete since all processing was done by hand off of journal sheets. The increasing population suggested that by the 1890 census the data processing would take longer than the 10 years before the next census - so a competition was held to try to find a better method. This was won by a Census Department employee, Herman Hollerith - who went on to found the Tabulating Machine Company (see 1911), later to become IBM. Herman borrowed Babbage's idea of using the punched cards (see 1801) from the textile industry for the data storage. This method was used in the 1890 census, the result (62,622,250 people) was released in just 6 weeks! This storage allowed much more 1896 IBM founded (as the Tabulating Machine Company), see 1924. Founded by Herman Hollerith (1860-1929, see also 1890). 1911 Merger of companies, including Herman Hollerith's Tabulating Machine Company, to Computing - Tabulating - Recording Company - which became IBM in 1924. 1924 Feb. International Business Machines (IBM corporation) formed after more mergers involving the Computing - Tabulating - Recording Company - see 1911. By 1990, IBM had an income of around $69 Billion (and 373,816 employees), although in 1992 recession caused a cut in stock dividends (for the first time in the company's history) and the sacking of 40,000 employees. 1935 International Business Machines introduces the "IBM 601", a punch card machine with an arithmetic unit based on relays and capable of doing a multiplication in 1 second. The machine becomes important both in scientific and commercial computation, and about 1500 of them are eventually made. 1943 "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.", Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM. 1943 Jan. The Harvard Mark I (originally ASCC Mark I, Harvard-IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator) was built at Harvard University by Howard H. Aiken (1900-1973) and his team, partly financed by IBM - it became the first program controlled calculator. 1950 Floppy Disk invented at the Imperial University in Tokyo by Doctor Yoshiro Nakamats, the sales license for the disk was granted to IBM. 1954 FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation) development started by John Backus and his team at IBM - continuing until 1957. FORTRAN is a programming language, used for Scientific programming. 1957 First Dot Matrix printer marketed by IBM. 1961 APL programming language released by Kenneth Iverson at IBM. 1964 Launch of IBM 360 - the first series of compatible computers. 1964 Programming language PL/1 released by IBM. 1968 "But what ... is it good for?" Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM commenting on the microchip. 1975 IBM 5100 released. 1976 First laser printer introduced by IBM - the IBM 3800. The first colour versions came onto the market in 1988. 1978 June Introduction of 8086 by Intel, the first commercially successful 16 bit processor. It was too expensive to implement in early computers, so an 8 bit version was developed (the 8088), which was chosen by IBM for the first IBM PC. This ensured the success of the x86 family of processors that succeeded the 8086 since they and their clones are used in every IBM PC compatible computer. 1979 IBM saw it's computer market dominance being eaten into by the new personal computers, such as the Apple and the Commodore PET. IBM therefore started work on their own P.C. This computer had to be a state-of-the-art machine in order to compete, but had to be produced very quickly due to the amazing growth of competitors. It was therefore decided to use many third party parts to reduce development time, and Microsoft [was] commissioned to write the Operating System (see October 1980). When finished this computer was released as the IBM PC [on 12 August 1981]. 1981 Aug 12 IBM Announced PC, the standard model was sold for $2880. This had 64Kb of RAM, a mono display and the cassette drive was an optional extra. Two 160Kb single sided floppy drives could be added. The machines success was largely due to the openness of it's specification, anyone could produce new and improved parts or models of the computer - the original IBM PC usually had an INTEL processor, Tandon disk drives and an operating system from Microsoft. 100,000 orders were taken by Christmas. The first one sold in the U.K. cost £2080. An option of operating systems was actually available, but IBM/Microsoft's PC-DOS was by far the cheapest at $39.95. 1981 Aug 12 ...Microsoft (known mainly for their programming languages) [was] commissioned by IBM to write the operating system, they bought a program called 86-DOS from Tim Paterson which was loosely based on CP/M 80. The final program from Microsoft was marketed by IBM as PC-DOS and by Microsoft as MS-DOS, collaboration on subsequent versions continued until version 5.0 in 1991.(...) 1982 May IBM launch the double-sided 320K floppy disk drives. 1982 Dec. IBM buys[s] 12% of Intel. 1983 Jan. IBM PC gets European launch at Which Computer Show. 1983 Spring IBM XT released, it was fitted with the 8086 (which could be replaced with an NEC V20 or V30) and had room for an 8087 maths co-processor to be installed. It also had a 10Mb hard disk, 128K of RAM, one floppy drive, mono monitor and a printer, all for $5000. 1983 Oct. IBM released PC Junior in an attempt to get further into the home market, it cost just $699. Cheaper alternatives from other companies were more preferable to the home buyer, but businesses continued to buy IBM. However this meant that the PC Jr. was not a great [success]. 1984 IBM AT released. This incorporates a larger (16-bit) bus for expansion slots. Unfortunately it wasn't well specified, the ISA standard was eventually made (in 1991) to cope with this - but not until some ATs had been produced with buses that run far quicker the 8.33 MHz laid down in the ISA standard. Some AT compatible systems designed before the standard was introduced ran the bus at 12.5 MHz which causes some expansion cards to run hot, therefore becoming less efficient and slower therefore eventually 'tripping over' and violently crashing the computer. 1987 April 2 PS/2 Systems introduced by IBM...The PS/2 series were very successful - selling well over 2 million machines in less than 2 years. 1987 VGA released (designed for the PS/2) by IBM. 1987 MCGA released (only for low end PS/2s, i.e. the Model 30) by IBM. 1987 The 8514/A introduced by IBM. This was a graphics card that included it's own processor to speed up the drawing of common objects, to take the load othe main CPU. 1987 April OS/2 Launched by Microsoft and IBM. A later enhancement, OS/2 Warp provided many of the 32-bit enhancements boasted by Windows '95 - but several years earlier, yet the product failed to dominate the market in the way Windows '95 did 8 year later. 1988 WORM (Write Once Read Many times) - disks marketed for first time by IBM. 1988 Sept. IBM PS/2 Model 30 286 released, based on an 80286 processor and the old AT bus - IBM abandoned the MCA bus, released less than 18 months earlier! Other IBM machines continued to use the MCA bus. Nov. 1990 MPC (Multimedia PC) Level 1 specification published by a council of companies including Microsoft and Creative Labs. This specified the minimum standards for a Multimedia IBM PC. The MPC level 1 specification originally required a 80286/12 MHz PC, but this was later increased to a 80386SX/16 MHz computer as an 80286 was realised to be inadequate. It also required a CD-ROM drive capable of 150 KB/sec (single speed) and also of Audio CD output. Companies can, after paying a fee, use the MPC logo on their products. 1997 In a six-game match, a chess-playing IBM computer known as Deep Blue defeats chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov - the first time a reigning world champion loses a match to a computer opponent in tournament play. Deep Blue is an IBM RS/6000 SP supercomputer capable of calculating 200 million chess positions per second. 1997 IBM Chairman Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. announces to IBM employees the debut of a major strategic campaign built around the IBM-coined term "e-business." 1997 For the fifth consecutive year, IBM receives more U.S. patents - 1,724 in all - than any other company. 1998 U.S. Vice President Al Gore announces Blue Pacific - the world's fastest computer - which is jointly developed by the U.S. Energy Department's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and IBM, can perform 3.9 trillion calculations per second (15,000 times faster than the average desktop computer) and has over 2.6 trillion bytes of memory (80,000 times more than the average PC). It would take a person using a calculator 63,000 years to perform as many calculations as this computer can perform in a single second. 1999 IBM Research announces a $100 million initiative to build a supercomputer, named "Blue Gene," that will be 500 times more powerful than the world's fastest computers. Capable of more than one quadrillion operations per second (one petaflop), its computing power will initially be used to model the folding of human proteins -- IBM's first computing "grand challenge" since "Deep Blue." 2000 Samuel J. Palmisano becomes president and chief operating officer, and John M. Thompson becomes vice chairman. 2001 IBM is selected by a consortium of four U.S. research centers in August to build the world's most powerful computing Grid, an interconnected series of Linux clusters capable of processing 13.6 trillion calculations per second. The Grid system -- known as the Distributed Terascale Facility -- will enable thousands of scientists around the United States to share computing resources over the world's fastest research network in search of breakthroughs in life sciences, climate modeling and other critical disciplines. That same month, IBM is selected to partner with several centers in the U.K. National Grid to link a massive network of computers throughout the United Kingdom, leveraging the company's expertise in scalable servers and storage, open standards, self-managing technologies, services and e-business software.   Credit of the information in the timeline from 1890 to 1997 goes to Stephen White. Credit of the information in the timeline from 1997 to 2001, and a more exhaustive look at the history of IBM is found at IBM's History site. Amazon has a book called Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? Inside IBM's Historic Turnaround by Louis V. Gerstner Jr.  Surprisingly, Amazon has integrated an option to read 21 pages of this book (though they are scattered, you can identify if you would really like to buy it--what a cool feature!)
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