IBM

What the organisation contributed

5 Unit-record administration and IBM standardisation Hollerith's enterprise evolved through corporate combinations into the company later named IBM. The company later joined the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, which adopted the IBM name in 1924. UNIVAC, IBM systems and other commercial machines brought electronic data processing into government and business. John Backus led the IBM team that developed the language and an ambitious optimising compiler, delivered for the IBM 704 in 1957. IBM's IMS, developed during the 1960s and released in 1968, organised records hierarchically and supported high-volume operational use. 4 IBM statistical models Corpus-derived probabilities and latent alignments established the statistical translation paradigm. IBM's Shoebox demonstrated spoken digits and arithmetic words during the early 1960s. The IBM 350 disk unit, introduced with RAMAC in 1956, established commercially useful direct access to records held on rotating disks. The IBM/BellSouth Simon combined a mobile phone with organiser, fax, pager and touch interface before the term acquired its modern meaning.

Why it mattered

Externalises repeatable instructions and structured records in a portable machine-readable form. Automates sorting, counting and summarising large structured record collections.