IBM

IBM, formally International Business Machines and long nicknamed "Big Blue," is an American multinational technology company and one of the oldest and most storied firms in the computing industry. Founded in the early twentieth century from the merger of several record-keeping and tabulating equipment makers, it rose to prominence manufacturing punch-card systems before becoming the dominant force in the early computer era. Its mainframe machines defined business and government computing for decades, at one point accounting for the vast majority of the world's installed systems and making IBM synonymous with the industry itself. Over time the company repeatedly reinvented its focus, shifting from hardware toward software, consulting and enterprise services as the market evolved and personal computers, which IBM helped popularize, eroded its old dominance. Renowned for its research laboratories, IBM has been one of the most prolific generators of patents and a pioneer in fields ranging from storage and semiconductors to artificial intelligence and quantum computing. Today it concentrates largely on serving large organizations with cloud platforms, data and AI technologies, and professional services rather than consumer products. A component of major stock indices and a fixture of corporate America, IBM remains an influential, if much-transformed, institution whose long history mirrors the evolution of computing. [edit]