Donovan Hall

5/5/14
Period 6
IBM can be dated back to the 1800s even though computers and the internet were not invented yet.
IBM describes their formation as a merger of 3 companies (Tabulating Machine Company, International
Time Recording Company and Computing Scale Company) and was renamed Computer Tabulating
Recording Company. CTRC was a holding company as the 3 companies continued to work as individuals,
CTRC manufactured Weighing Scales, meat slicers, coffee grinders, punched card equipment and other
various items. CTRC was mainly based in New York but had factories and offices in Michigan, Ohio,
Ontario and DC boasting about 1300 people working for them. CTRC was difficult to manage so Charles
F. Flint hired Thomas J. Watson Sr to be the General Manager and within less than a year he was
promoted to president taking the company to new heights, the company revenues more than doubled
to 9 million, he expanded the company to Australia, South America, Asia and Europe and even coming
up with the company motto THINK. In 1917 CTRC enters the Canadian business market under the
name International Business Co Limited also known as IBM. IBM continued to make strides in the early
1920s introducing its employee newspaper and other various products to improve worker productivity,
the company made clocks and other time products until 1958 when they sold the time division to the
Timex Company. During the great depression Watson did not flee from the challenge he continued to
invest in people and look on the bright side, he hired people instead of laying people off and also
increased his workers benefits. Watson and IBM were one of the first companies to provide paid
vacations, survivor benefits and group life insurance and also opened up a school to provide education
to his employees. Watson did all of this during the great depression which was a huge risk because he
was gambling on the future which looked pretty bleak due to The Great Depression but his investment
payed off because in 1935 IBM was given the contract to manage employment records for 26 million
people which was seen as the biggest accounting contract of all time. During WWII IBM production was
turned over to the government and they produced wartime products and ended up making a profit off

Donovan Hall
5/5/14
Period 6
of it which was used to provide funds for widows and orphans. The war also led to IBM taking steps
toward computing with them producing the Mark I which was the first machine that could execute long
equations automatically which was over 50 feet long and weighed 5 tons. In 1952 IBM came out with
the IBM 701 its first large computer based on Vacuum tubes and was mainly used by the government, it
could execute 17,000 instructions per second. By 1959 Vacuum tubes were becoming obsolete which
pushed IBM to create the IBM 7090 which could perform 229,000 instructions per second a great
improvement from the 701, then in 1957 IBM created the RAMAC the first computer disk storage
system which could retrieve data on the 50 spinning disks in less than a second and answered world
history questions in 10 languages at the World Fair in Brussels in 1958. Watson died and passed the
company over to his son Watson JR who decided to invest heavily in order to make IBM a world leader
in the computer industry, he decided to stop bundling items and to sell them individually which
increased profit. In the 80s John R Opel took over as CEO and started to heavily manufacture the IBM
brand of Pcs which started to enter the family home, schools and businesses the IBM pc at the time
offered 16 kilobytes of memory which could be expanded to 256 kilobytes one or two floppy disk and a
color monitor if desired, it ran DOS by Microsoft. IBM faced issues in the 1980s and 90s with PCs being
available to millions of people where the focus then became on personal productivity and the desktop
and not business application IBM ended up losing 8 billion dollars.