IBM

International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York. It was founded in 1911 in Endicott, New York, as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) and was renamed "International Business Machines" in 1924. IBM is incorporated in New York and has operations in over 170 countries. IBM produces and sells computer hardware, middleware and software, and provides hosting and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology. It is also a major research organization, as of 2020 holding the record for most U.S. patents generated by a business for 27 consecutive years. Inventions by IBM include the floppy disk, the hard disk drive, the magnetic stripe card, the relational database, the SQL programming language, the UPC barcode, and dynamic random-access memory (DRAM). The IBM mainframe, exemplified by the System/360, was the dominant computing platform during the 1960s and 1970s. IBM has continually shifted business operations by focusing on higher-value, more profitable markets. This includes spinning off its printer and keyboard manufacturing division, the IBM Information Products Corporation, to Lexmark in 1991; selling its personal computer (ThinkPad/ThinkCentre) and x86-based server businesses to Lenovo in 2005 and 2014, respectively; and acquiring companies such as PwC Consulting (2002), SPSS (2009), The Weather Company (2016), and Red Hat (2019). In 2015, IBM announced that it would go "fabless", continuing to design semiconductors, but offloading manufacturing to GlobalFoundries.