Big Blue celebrates its 100th

International Business Machines (IBM), headquartered at Armonk, New York, celebrated its 100th birthday on Thursday.

Founded in 1911 as the Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation, it was a merger of the Tabulating Machine Company, International Time Recording Company and the Computing Scale Corporation. Thomas Watson Senior was the man responsible for making this Company a vanguard of technological innovation.

IBM has got more patents as compared to any other U.S. technology company and it takes pride in the fact that its employees have won five Nobel prizes.

IBM's one another great achievement earlier this year was when Watson, an artificial intelligence computer, outmatched its human opponents. It is a deep analytic system made out of several IBM Powered 750 servers and it changed the paradigm in which we work with computers.

The Company was not successful with its personal computers and struggled in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Thomas Misa, a history of science and technology professor at the University of Minnesota said, "Microsoft and Intel were the big winners in the personal computer market, which IBM defined but did not long dominate."

In the year 2005, IBM sold its personal computer division to Lenovo, a Chinese computer technology corporation.

In 2009, IBM's supercomputing program, Blue Gene, which reached sustained speed of 500 tera FLOPS, was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation by President Barack Obama.

IBM was in the headlines when its chess-playing computer, Deep Blue, won against the world champion Garry Kasparov.

A notable initiative by this company is the Smarter Planet that aims at achieving economical growth using the potential of smarter systems like smart grids, greener buildings, water and traffic managements systems, etc along with societal advancement and sustainable development.