Short answers, pulled from the story.
IBM was founded on the 16th of June 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR), formed by Charles Ranlett Flint in New York State through the merger of four companies. The name was changed to International Business Machines on the 14th of February 1924.
IBM inventions include the hard disk drive (1956), the magnetic stripe card (1969), the Universal Product Code barcode (1974), Dynamic Random-Access Memory (DRAM), the floppy disk, the relational database, and the SQL programming language. IBM also introduced the FORTRAN programming language in 1957 and the SABRE airline reservation system in 1961.
IBM produced approximately 346,500 M1 Carbine rifles between August 1943 and May 1944, representing 6 percent of total wartime production. IBM also built the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, an electromechanical computer, during the war. Its German subsidiary supplied Hollerith punch-card equipment to the Nazi regime, which was used to categorize people and facilitate the Holocaust.
IBM entered the microcomputer market in 1981 with the IBM 5150 Personal Computer but failed to adequately protect the architecture with intellectual property rights, allowing compatible competitors to flood the market. By 1993, IBM posted an $8 billion loss, the largest in American corporate history at the time. IBM eventually sold its entire personal computer business to Lenovo.
IBM Watson is an AI platform using natural language processing and machine learning. In 2011, it competed against champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on the American game show Jeopardy! in a three-game tournament and won. Watson has since been applied to healthcare, business, and universities.
Five IBM employees have received Nobel Prizes: Leo Esaki in 1973 for semiconductor research, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer in 1986 for the scanning tunneling microscope, and Georg Bednorz and Alex Müller in 1987 for superconductivity research. Six IBM employees have also won the Turing Award, including Frances E. Allen, the award's first female recipient.