IBM

• 1. Introduction

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  IBM, formally the International Business Machines Corporation, was born in Endicott, New York, on the 16th of June 1911, when a financier named Charles Ranlett Flint merged four separate companies into one holding entity. Those four companies made meat slicers, time clocks, computing scales, and punch-card tabulators. Nobody would have looked at that combination and predicted the company that emerged: one that would, within a few decades, produce 80 percent of computers in the United States and 70 percent of all computers on earth. How did a holding company of industrial gadget makers become the backbone of global computing? What does it mean that the barcode on every product you buy, the ATM card in your wallet, and the hard drive in nearly every computer trace directly back to this one organization? And what happens to a company that dominates an era so completely that it cannot adapt when the era changes? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. Watson's Blueprint

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  Thomas J. Watson, Sr. arrived at the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in 1914 under unusual circumstances: he had just been fired from the National Cash Register Company by a man named John Henry Patterson. Watson called on Flint, who had assembled CTR, and was offered the position of general manager. Eleven months later, after antitrust cases from his NCR days were resolved, Watson became president. He proceeded to transplant everything he had learned from Patterson onto his new company. He introduced sales conventions and what the source describes as "generous sales incentives, a focus on customer service, an insistence on well-groomed, dark-suited salesmen" and an evangelical drive for company pride. His favorite slogan was a single word: "THINK." It became the unofficial creed of every employee. Within his first four years, revenues reached $9 million. Watson also disliked the name "Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company" and replaced it with "International Business Machines," a title borrowed from CTR's Canadian division. The change was made official on the 14th of February 1924. By 1933, the remaining subsidiaries had been folded into one unified IBM.

• 3. Mainframes and Monopoly

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  On the 7th of April 1964, IBM launched the System/360, describing it as the first computer family designed to span the complete range of applications from small to large. For the first time, a company could upgrade to a more powerful IBM model without rewriting all of its software. That promise proved extraordinarily powerful. The System/360, followed by the System/370 in 1970, drove IBM to a position so dominant that the United States Department of Justice accused it in 1969 of violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. The lawsuit alleged that IBM had monopolized the general-purpose electronic digital computer market. Almost immediately after the suit was filed, IBM unbundled its software and services, which many observers read as a direct response to the legal pressure. The operating systems built on these platforms, including OS/VS1 and MVS, along with middleware like the CICS transaction processing monitor, held what the source describes as a near-monopoly-level market share. IBM also developed the SABRE reservation system for American Airlines in 1961 and introduced the Selectric typewriter that same year. The Department of Justice ultimately dropped its antitrust case in 1982 as "without merit," but by then IBM's cultural and commercial dominance of the mainframe era was already established.

• 4. Inventions That Outlasted IBM

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  In 1956, IBM engineer Herman Hollerith's original punch-card lineage found a very different kind of descendant: the hard disk drive, introduced on the IBM 305 RAMAC. Three years later, in 1957, IBM announced FORTRAN, the scientific programming language that researchers still use today. In 1969, an IBM engineer named Forrest Parry invented the magnetic stripe card. For most of the 1970s, the data processing systems for magnetic stripe applications ran exclusively on IBM computers. In 1974, IBM engineer George J. Laurer developed the Universal Product Code, the barcode that now marks virtually every retail product on the planet. Also in 1974, IBM worked with the South Vietnamese Ministry of Education to computerize all high school examination records, grading answer sheets on an IBM 1230 machine and processing scores through an IBM 360. In 1956, Arthur L. Samuel at IBM's Poughkeepsie, New York, laboratory programmed an IBM 704 to not just play checkers but learn from its own experience. IBM and the company's researchers described this as the first practical demonstration of artificial intelligence. In 1990, scientists at IBM used a scanning tunneling microscope to arrange 35 individual xenon atoms to spell out the company's initials, marking the first time a structure had been assembled one atom at a time.

• 5. The PC Gamble and Its Aftermath

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  IBM entered the microcomputer market in 1981 with the IBM 5150, the Personal Computer that would ultimately remake the technology industry. The PC became one of IBM's best-selling products of all time. But IBM failed to protect the machine's architecture with adequate intellectual property coverage. As a result, compatible competitors flooded the market and IBM found itself losing dominance to the very ecosystem it had created. In 1985, IBM collaborated with Microsoft to develop a new operating system, released as OS/2. The collaboration ended in a dispute; Microsoft went its own way, and OS/2 failed against Windows during the mid-1990s. In 1992, IBM reported a sharp drop in profit margins, attributed by analysts to a fierce price war in the personal computer market. The company spun off its personal computer manufacturing into an autonomous subsidiary called the IBM Personal Computer Company. By 1993, IBM posted an $8 billion loss, the largest in American corporate history to that point. Lou Gerstner was brought in as CEO from RJR Nabisco to reverse the decline. In 1995, IBM purchased Lotus Development Corporation, best known for Lotus 1-2-3. IBM eventually sold its entire personal computer business to the Chinese company Lenovo, completing the exit from a market it had launched.

• 6. Deep Blue, Watson, and AI's Long Arc

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  In 1997, a chess computer called Deep Blue, built by IBM, beat the reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a six-round match following standard tournament rules. It was a striking demonstration of what IBM's researchers could accomplish. In 2011, a very different kind of IBM machine appeared on the American television game show Jeopardy!, competing against champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a three-game tournament. That machine, Watson, used natural language processing and machine learning to win. IBM went on to apply Watson to healthcare, partnering with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to assist with oncology treatment options and melanoma screenings. In January 2019, IBM introduced its first commercial quantum computer, the IBM Q System One. In March 2020, IBM announced plans to build Europe's first quantum data center in Ehningen, Germany, operated by the Fraunhofer Society. In May 2023, IBM revealed Watsonx, a generative AI toolkit built on IBM's own Granite models. In October 2024, IBM introduced Granite 3.0, an open-source large language model intended for enterprise AI applications. The pattern running across all of this work connects directly to what Arthur L. Samuel demonstrated in Poughkeepsie in 1956, when a machine first learned from playing checkers.

• 7. Patents, Research, and the Nobel Shelf

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  IBM Research traces its organized origins to 1945, when the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory was founded at Columbia University, converting a former fraternity house on Manhattan's West Side into IBM's first laboratory. That single room eventually grew into the largest industrial research organization in the world, with 12 labs on 6 continents. The main facility is the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York. From 1993 to 2021, IBM held the record for most annual U.S. patents generated by any business for 29 consecutive years. In 2001, IBM became the first company to generate more than 3,000 patents in a single year, then surpassed that figure in 2008 with more than 4,000. As of 2022, IBM held 150,000 patents. Five employees have received Nobel Prizes: Leo Esaki in 1973 for semiconductor work, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer in 1986 for the scanning tunneling microscope, and Georg Bednorz and Alex Müller in 1987 for superconductivity research. Six employees have won the Turing Award, including Frances E. Allen, the award's first female recipient. In 2024, IBM reported research and development expenditures of $7.48 billion, an increase of roughly 10.3 percent over the prior year. The company's December 2025 announcement of a deal to acquire data-infrastructure company Confluent for approximately $11 billion suggests that IBM's research appetite has not diminished.

• 8. Brand, Culture, and Controversy

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  The nickname "Big Blue" refers partly to IBM's blue logo and color scheme, and partly to the former dress code of white shirts and blue suits that Watson Sr. instilled in the company's earliest days. The current eight-bar IBM logo was designed in 1972 by graphic designer Paul Rand, replacing a 13-bar version because period photocopiers could not render narrow stripes well. IBM used Helvetica as its corporate typeface for 50 years before switching in 2017 to a custom-designed font called IBM Plex. The company's cultural reach extended well beyond technology. IBM sponsored the Olympic Games from 1960 to 2000 and the National Football League from 2003 to 2012. Since 1996, IBM has been the exclusive technology partner for the Masters Tournament golf championship. IBM employees and alumni include Tim Cook of Apple, Ross Perot, Lisa Su of AMD, Nobel Literature laureate J. M. Coetzee, musician Dave Matthews, and Patricia Roberts Harris, the first African American woman to serve in the United States Cabinet. IBM's history also carries darker episodes. Its German subsidiary, Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen GmbH, supplied punch-card equipment to Nazi Germany from the early 1930s, equipment that was used to categorize people and facilitate the machinery of the Holocaust. In 2000, IBM collaborated with the Chinese defense contractor Huadi on a large-scale surveillance system in Beijing reportedly used to monitor Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs, and others. In June 2025, a UN expert report named IBM as one of several companies central to Israel's surveillance apparatus and activities in Gaza.