International Business Machines traces its origin to 1911. IBM’s own history pages record that the company began as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, formed by merging several record-keeping and measuring-equipment makers, and that under Thomas J. Watson it grew into a maker of punch-card tabulating systems before the modern computer existed.
The familiar name came in 1924, when IBM’s history records that the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company was renamed International Business Machines. From punch cards and tabulators, the company moved into electronic computing in the 1950s and 1960s, defining the mainframe era with machines such as the System/360.
IBM’s research laboratories drove several foundational advances in software and data. The FORTRAN language, the first widely used high-level programming language, came out of IBM in the 1950s. In 1970 IBM researcher Edgar Codd published the relational model of data, and IBM’s history of the relational database describes how its San Jose laboratory then built System R to prove the model in practice, producing SQL along the way.
Beyond databases, IBM shaped personal computing with the 1981 IBM PC and demonstrated the reach of its research with projects like the Deep Blue chess machine. Across more than a century the company has remained one of the most influential institutions in the history of computing.