IBM celebrates hundredth birthday

Computergigant IBM celebrates Thursday its hundredth anniversary. On June 16, 1911 was Big Blue from a merger of four smaller companies. The company began with the production of tabelleermachines and was one of the largest tech.

Exactly one hundred years ago, on June 16, 1911, merged four companies into the Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation. That would be a low key event to have been, were it not that this company, in 1924 was renamed International Business Machines, better known as IBM. Initially, the company produced a multitude of products, including coffee grinders and scales, but also tabelleermachines. Those machines, invented by one of the four businesses that the current IBM company merged, were in the precomputerhistorie the fastest way to get large amounts of information. The production of it would soon IBM’s main occupation. The machines that worked with punch cards, were used for population censuses.

The company grew as a coal; in the late forties was the IBM in 79 countries. Underneath it was also in Germany when the Second world War broke out. The naziregering put the tabelleermachines in the Jewish population by census to map, what the run of the holocaust at least has facilitated. According to IBM, it could there would be little against it, because its German subsidiary under the control of the nazis was made. According to critics, was that the German subsidiary of the nazis, however, more than satisfied.

After the Second world War, the development of more advanced computers, that worked with magnetic storage in place of punched cards, a high flight. IBM, or Big Blue, has developed into the largest computer manufacturer, with a market share of 70 percent. That was not just; the development of IBM’s first series of mainframes, introduced in 1964, took allegedly more than the development of the atomic bomb. In addition, the company worked a lot for the Us government; so, it built a luchtafweersysteem with the name Sage.

On August 12, 1981 the IBM PC was introduced. While there is at that time roughly a decade ‘microcomputers’ were produced, such as the famous Apple II, continued IBM with its modular mounted Personal Computer, a standard that, until the day of today the computerlandschap determines. The descendants of the at 4.77 MHz geklokte Intel 8088 processor drive still most of the pcs, and the IBM PC was the platform on which Microsoft’s MS-DOS to fruition.

The manufacturer had for his pc in addition, an open architecture based on standard components chosen for cost and development time to spare. As a result, other manufacturers the machine is easily able to reverse engineer, and so it came to pass. The IBM PC and its countless clones were initially especially popular in office environments, but had in the late eighties, the home market also conquered. In particular, the many on Z80 and 6502 processors based personal computers, and home computers were within a few years completely forced out of business. Only Apple knew a few decades a significant market share to hold with its Motorola – and – nota bene – IBM cpu’s, but also that the company finally relented to the dominance of the x86 architecture.

IBM got it in the beginning of the nineties, nevertheless, pretty difficult, as builders of ‘IBM PC Compatibles’ faster innovated and IBM failed to deliver the pace of the market. That led the company to billions of loss made and on the edge of the abyss balanced. In the mid-nineties, knew the company from red figures to climb, partly because the focus is less on hardware and more on software was. Eventually, it was the pc division in 2005 to Lenovo sold.

Update, 9:58: piece of text about the IBM PC.