IBM a history of the company and its technology

IBM's story, in order, from a census that took eight years to count to a quantum computer that does not exist yet.

Herman Hollerith's punched-card tabulator counted the 1890 US census in six months. The company that grew from it became C-T-R in 1911 and IBM in 1924, under Thomas Watson. Along the way: the 80-column card (1928), electric typewriters and the Selectric's golf ball (1961), a test-scoring machine that read pencil marks (1938), and the Social Security records (1936).

Then the machines that made modern computing: the 701 and 650, magnetic core memory, RAMAC - the first hard disk (1956) - and FORTRAN (1957). System/360 (1964), IBM's own 'five billion dollar gamble', created the compatible mainframe family that still runs banks today. Robert Dennard's DRAM, the floppy disk, the Winchester drive, Codd's relational database and SQL, the barcode, and RISC.

The IBM PC of 1981 made IBM a household name - and made Microsoft and Intel rich, because PC DOS was licensed, not owned. OS/2, the AS/400 and OS/400, two Nobel prizes from Zurich, the ThinkPad, and the near-collapse of 27 July 1993. Then Deep Blue, Linux, Blue Gene, selling the PC business to Lenovo, Watson on Jeopardy!, Red Hat, Kyndryl, the z16 and z17 mainframes, watsonx, HashiCorp and Confluent - and the quantum roadmap to Starling in 2029.

Every figure is dated and sourced. IBM's own claims about its future are labelled as claims. The Dehomag chapter states what an academic study documents and nothing beyond it.

Educational documentary. Not financial or investment advice.