IBM

I.B.M., or International Business Machines, started as a company that manufactured and sold calculators for use by businesses. IBM became a powerful and very large company when it started to manufacture the computers for use by business, industry, technology and science. The first computers were very large machines that could take up the whole floor of a building. You'll see them in old movies with reels rapidly spinning on the front like tape recorders. The early computers were programmed by means of cards with holes punched in them which were "read" by the computer. A complicated program, and a lot of data involved a lot of cards, which had to be kept in order to work properly.

After cards came the use of keyboards to program and input data, and printers to display the data that was output. The following innovation was the use of television monitors to display data.

I.B.M. began to lose its predominance in the computer field with the advent of the personal computer or PC. Apple, Atari,Texas Instruments, Microsoft and other companies began to produce much smaller computers which could be used in the home or by small businesses.