1935: The U.S. adopts Social Security and IBM's punched card machines to help with the massive record keeping required to keep tabs on tens of millions of Americans.

1939: International Business Machines sponsors art at the 1939 World's Fair.

1942: IBM becomes involved in the war effort, helping keep track of vital statistics. Below, we see an IBM tabulating machine below used in keeping track of freight traffic in the country.

1944: IBM co-develops its first computer, the Automated Sequence Controlled Calculator aka Mark I, with Harvard University. It was used by the Navy to calculate gun trajectories.

1946: IBM provides a translation system for the Nuremberg trials.



1952: This was the Golden Age of IBM. Thomas J. Watson, Jr., became the president of the company, marking, by the company's own reckoning, the beginning of its time as a modern corporation.

1956: During this period, IBM made a number of important electronic advancements. Below, you can see the first commercial hard disk drive, the 350 RAMAC Disk Storage Unit, which was a major component of the groundbreaking 305 RAMAC computer.



1960: IBM employs 100,000 people. During this period, IBM made and sold massive computers to large governments and corporations. Computers were not yet devices for regular people. In 1964, MIT's Martin Greenberger took to the pages of this magazine to extoll the widespread use of computers ... and there were only 20,000!

Only a decade ago, in 1954, a UNIVAC was delivered to the General Electric Company in Louisville for business use. Up to that point, computers had been applied almost exclusively to scientific calculation. Quickly, payroll, inventory, and customer accounting became fair game. Today there are probably more than twenty thousand computers in use within the United States, and correspondingly large numbers are installed in many other countries around the world.

1968: Charles and Ray Eames put out "Powers of 10," a film about "the effect of adding another zero." Fundamentally about scale, it arrived on the scene at the tail end of the post-war boom, a period in which American industry basically did add another zero, growing and globalizing. IBM's computers helped businesses both manage and produce massive amounts of data, thereby assuring that ever more powerful machines would be needed to keep up with both sides of the information problem.



1980: Microsoft and IBM sign a deal to put the former's operating system on IBM computers.

1981: The IBM Personal Computer 5150 debuts, a landmark in the transition of computing from the province of the military and big government to everyday people.



1985: IBM clones permeate the market. Without really trying to, IBM-compatible comes to mean "every personal computer not produced by Apple." Though the company was losing marketshare in desktop computing, it was still setting the agenda including the use of Microsoft's operating system, MS-DOS.

