IBM

Introduction

The International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is an American multinational technology corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, with operations in over 171 countries. The company began in 1911, founded in Endicott, New York, by trust businessman Charles Ranlett Flint, as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) and was renamed "International Business Machines" in 1924. IBM is incorporated in New York.

IBM produces and sells computer hardware, middleware and software, and provides hosting and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology. IBM is also a major research organization, holding the record for most annual U.S. patents generated by a business (as of 2021) for 29 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). The IBM mainframe, exemplified by the System/360, was the dominant computing platform during the 1960s and 1970s.

IBM is one of 30 companies included in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and one of the world's largest employers, with over 282,100 employees as of 2022.

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History

IBM has been of the most influential companies in the world for more than a century. It is known for always pushing technology and innovation forward. In addition to companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft, the achievements of IBM have played a major role in the information age.

IBM was founded in New York more than 100 years ago
Entrepreneur Herman Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company in 1888 in Armonk, New York. The company later gave rise to IBM. IBM (International Business Machines) was founded on June 15, 1911 as a corporation.

Five IBM employees have won the Nobel Prize
Leo Esaki, Georg Bednorz, Alex Buhler, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer were rewarded with the most prestigious award in the world for their technical excellence in research and science.

IBM has created machines capable of competing successfully against chess masters
Deep Blue was a chess-playing computer developed by IBM. It is known for being the first computer chess-playing system to win both a chess game and a chess match against a reigning world champion under regular time controls. Deep Blue had the capability to evaluating 200 million different positions per second.

IBM has a long list of inventions and technologies
Famous inventions and developments by IBM include: the Automated teller machine (ATM), Dynamic random access memory (DRAM), the electronic keypunch, the financial swap, the floppy disk, the hard disk drive, the magnetic stripe card, SQL, the Universal Product Code (UPC) bar code, and the virtual machine.

Why Big Blue?
Although IBM has been called "Big Blue" for decades, no one knows for sure how IBM acquired this nickname. Many believe that it is the logo color and its global order that are the reason for it.

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Innovation

As part of our relentless capacity for reinvention, we decided in 2020 that we would no longer pursue the goal of numeric patent leadership. As a result, 2022 is the first time since 1993 that IBM didn’t claim the top spot on the list of companies with the most U.S. patents. Why, after three decades, such a radical shift? One word: focus.

Today, IBM is a hybrid cloud and A.I. company. While we will remain an intellectual property powerhouse with one of the strongest U.S. patent portfolios, as part of our innovation strategy, focus means that we are taking a more selective approach to patenting. We have turned more of our talent and resources towards achieving high-quality, high-impact advancements in the specific areas of hybrid cloud, data and A.I., automation, security, semiconductors, and quantum computing.

Patents are only one measure of a company’s true capacity for innovation. IBM will continue to patent new technology, but patents alone are a more incomplete barometer than ever before. Read more…

Darío Gil, Director of IBM Research

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Patents and Innovation

On January 26, 1939, James W. Bryce, IBM’s chief engineer, dictated a two-page letter to Thomas J. Watson, Sr., the company’s president. It was an update on the research and patents he had been working on. Today, the remarkable letter serves as a window into IBM’s long-held role as a leader in the development and protection of intellectual property.

IBM’s legacy of innovation in They Were There
Learn more about IBM’s century of research and innovation in this clip from the IBM Centennial film, They Were There.

Bryce was one of the most prolific inventors in American history, racking up more than 500 U.S. and foreign patents by the end of his career. In his letter to Watson, he described six projects, each of which would be considered a signature life achievement for the average person. They included research into magnetic recording of data, an investigation into the use of light rays in computing and plans with Harvard University for what would become one of the first digital computers. But another project was perhaps most significant. Wrote Bryce: “We have been carrying on an investigation in connection with the development of computing devices which do not employ the usual adding wheels, but instead use electronic effects and employ tubes similar to those used in radio work.”

The investigation bore fruit. On January 15, 1940, Arthur H. Dickinson, Bryce’s top associate and a world-beating inventor in his own right, submitted an application for a patent for “certain improvements in accounting apparatus.” In fact, the patent represented a turning point in computing history. Dickinson, under Bryce’s supervision, had invented a method for adding and subtracting using vacuum tubes—a basic building block of the fully electronic computers that began to appear in the 1940s and transformed the world of business in the 1950s.

This pattern—using innovation to create intellectual property—is evident throughout IBM’s history. Indeed, intellectual property has been strategically important at IBM since before it was IBM.

The patent leader
IBM has a longstanding history of patent leadership. In 2010, the company was awarded 5,896 patents, exceeding the combined issuances of Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, EMC and Google.

Herman Hollerith, inventor of the tabulating machine that was used in U.S. population censuses, had worked briefly as an assistant examiner at the U.S. Patent Office in 1883–84 before becoming a full-time inventor. Soon after leaving government service, he filed his first patent—for an electrical calculating system that was the basis for his Tabulating Machine Co., a precursor of IBM. By hiring engineering consultant Bryce in 1917, Watson showed that he recognized the importance of pure inventing. Rather than developing products, Bryce’s job was to dream up new ways of doing things and patent them. He established a patent development department in 1932, hiring Dickinson, who later described his boss’ style: “If he had an idea or was thinking about something, he would discuss it. Usually he would make a sketch or a drawing, which was sufficient to establish what he was thinking about or what he wanted to do.”

The pattern continues today. In a world where relationships and innovation are increasingly collaborative, the concept of intellectual property is undergoing profound change—and IBM is leading the way toward new regimes and approaches to the creation of intellectual capital. The company’s century of fostering innovation has revealed that the way to optimize intellectual property systems for maximum innovation in this new world is to seek balance between appropriate protection of individual and organizational ownership on one hand, and the fostering of new, open, collaborative forms of value creation on the other.

For example, IBM helped establish the open-source operating system Linux ® as a mainstream software platform in business by declaring in 2005 that it would not enforce its patents against the Linux kernel. In 2008, IBM co-founded the Eco-Patent Commons and contributed 28 patents covering environmentally friendly business and manufacturing processes, which are now freely available for anybody to use for eco-friendly purposes.

At the same time, IBM has taken significant steps to improve the performance of national patent offices and stimulate innovation throughout society. In 2006, in collaboration with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and other companies, IBM helped establish the Peer-to-Patent project. This project enables experts to contribute evidence of prior inventions via a website, helping patent examiners evaluate the patent-worthiness of an application.

Through it all, IBM’s dedication to inventing and protecting intellectual property is as strong as ever. In 2010, IBM ranked number one among companies receiving U.S. patents, with 5,896 granted. It marked the company’s 18th consecutive year as the U.S. patent leader.

Patent services firm IFI Claims recently released a report on patent activity in the Generative AI space. According to IFI’s research, both the number of patent applications related to generative AI, as well as the number of patent grants have been increasing rapidly in recent years. The report claims that IBM currently leads the pack with over 1,500 generative AI patent applications.

Patents help tech companies protect their innovations by granting them exclusive rights to their inventions for a certain period.

  List of IBM patents 

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