International Business Machines

IBM’s predecessor, C-T-R, formed in 1911 by combining tabulating, time-recording, and computing-scale businesses, taking the International Business Machines name in 1924. Punched-card equipment encoded records for tabulation and classification. Early work with census, commercial, and administrative data helped establish a business around equipment, service, and continuing organizational information needs.

References: [1]

System/360, introduced in 1964, organized machines of different performance levels around a common architecture. The aim was to reduce the burden of rewriting software when customers changed equipment. This product strategy connected processors, software, peripherals, manufacturing, and service into a continuing platform rather than treating every machine as an isolated design.

References: [2]

John Backus’s team developed the FORTRAN system for the IBM 704 and delivered it in 1957. Users wrote programs resembling mathematical formulas, while the compiler organized machine operations. The team also had to demonstrate efficient generated code, showing how programming tools could make computer resources usable for scientific and engineering work.

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At IBM’s San Jose laboratory, Edgar Codd proposed the relational model in 1970. System R subsequently investigated execution, with Chamberlin and Boyce developing SQL and Selinger contributing query optimization. Different researchers connected theory, language, and implementation, while the organization supported both exploratory work and the effort to turn experiments into deployable database products.

References: [4]