International Business Machines꞉ From Saloon Piano to Computer

International Business Machines (commonly referred to as IBM) is an American multinational technology company. The company originated in 1911 thanks to punch card technology inspired by saloon pianos. IBM was originally called the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) and was renamed "International Business Machines" in 1924.

IBM manufactures and markets computer hardware, middleware and software, and offers hosting and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology. IBM is also a major research organization, holding the record for most patents generated by a business (as of 2017) for 24 consecutive years.

Inventions by IBM include the automated teller machine (ATM), 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).