ORGANIZATION
International Business Machines (IBM)
Founded as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in 1911 (renamed IBM in 1924). From the 1920s the world's principal office-equipment supplier; in the post-war era it set the de facto standard for mainframe computing with System/360 (1964). The IBM PC (1981) was the seed of the Wintel ecosystem and the entire PC-clone industry. Also known for the pre-AlphaGo milestone Deep Blue (1997) and the NLP system Watson (2011).
Organization
- Founded
- 1911
- Status
- Active
- Active for
- 115 years
- Appearances
- 03
- Name
- ENInternational Business Machines (IBM)JAIBM
Appearances
- April 1957FORTRAN ReleasedAfter roughly three years of development, John Backus' team at IBM completed and shipped the first compiler for FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator), the first practical high-level programming language, targeting the IBM 704. The transition point from writing assembly directly to writing mathematics in something close to mathematical notation; every high-level language that followed descends from it.
- August 12, 1981MS-DOS 1.0 — Shipping with the IBM PCMicrosoft adapted 86-DOS (formerly QDOS), which it had bought from Seattle Computer Products, and shipped it as PC DOS 1.0 with the IBM PC. Crucially, Microsoft retained the right to sell the same software, as MS-DOS, to any other compatible-machine manufacturer. Bill Gates' licensing strategy here produced the next fifteen years of PC OS dominance.
- May 11, 1997Deep Blue Defeats Garry KasparovIBM's chess-specific machine Deep Blue defeated the reigning world champion Garry Kasparov 3.5–2.5 in their six-game rematch. Kasparov had won the 1996 series; IBM substantially upgraded both hardware and evaluation function over the following year. It was the first decisive defeat of a top human chess player by a machine, and is often cited in AI history as a symbolic threshold—though its substance was game-tree search plus a specialised evaluation function, with no modern learning involved.