IBM

What IBM is

IBM, short for International Business Machines, is an American technology company headquartered at 1 Orchard Road, Armonk, New York.^[1] Wikipedia lists 264,300 employees in 2025.^[1] What makes the company unusual among technology firms is the length of its record: its history runs back to the early 20th century, and the machines it produced along the way became reference points in the wider public discussion of what computers can do.

From CTR to IBM

The company's history begins on 16 June 1911, when Charles Ranlett Flint amalgamated four companies in New York State into the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, known as CTR.^[1] CTR was based in Endicott, New York, and the combined companies had 1,300 employees.^[1] Wikipedia lists three founders: Flint, George Winthrop Fairchild and Herman Hollerith.^[1] The name International Business Machines dates from 14 February 1924, when the company was renamed.^[1]

Stretch, and a chess machine

IBM says its first supercomputer, Stretch, was introduced in 1961 with a processing speed of less than 500 flops.^[2] Flops — floating point operations per second — is the unit used to count how many arithmetic steps a machine can carry out each second, so the figure describes a machine whose capacity was measured in the hundreds rather than the billions.

In 1989, IBM Research hired Feng-hsiung Hsu and Murray Campbell to build a chess computer, and the machine was renamed Deep Blue after IBM's nickname, Big Blue.^[2] In May 1997 Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a match.^[2] Chess suits machines in one respect: every piece is visible and the rules are fixed, so a program can search ahead through possible moves and score the positions it reaches. The open question was whether that engineering could hold up against the strongest human player, and the match was the test. After the victory, IBM retired Deep Blue to the Smithsonian Museum and in 1999 launched the Deep Computing Institute.^[2]

Blue Gene and Watson

IBM says it went on to develop massively parallel computers such as Blue Gene and Watson.^[2] Watson, the question-answering system, was developed by an IBM research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci, and it was named after IBM's first CEO, Thomas J. Watson Sr.^[3] A chess machine searches a board; a question-answering system starts from a question written in ordinary language, looks through a body of text for passages that might contain the answer, and ranks the candidate answers it finds. IBM said roughly 70% of global finance institutions and 13 of the top 14 systems integrators use Watson.^[3]

What the record shows

Taken together, these projects show a pattern in which research results do not stay inside a laboratory. They acquire names, and the names travel: Deep Blue was retired to a museum and the company set up a dedicated institute around deep computing^[2]; Watson carries the name of the company's first chief executive and was described as a system that finance institutions and integrators could use^[3]. For a general reader such machines are convenient landmarks for judging how far machine intelligence has come; for the company they are also a public statement about its research capacity.