Founded by Charles Ranlett Flint (1850–1934) as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in 1911, the company known in 2001 as International Business Machines (IBM) started out making shopkeepers' scales and counting machines for the U.S. Census Bureau. IBM became famous for its mainframe computers in the 1950s and 1960s when it was one of America's largest and most powerful corporations. Some say the blue suits worn by the sales staff inspired the press to nickname the company "Big Blue"; others say it was the color of the "big blue boxes," the large mainframe computers of the 1960s. Always seen as one of the safe bets of American commerce, when IBM collapsed in the late 1980s, it sent shock-waves through the world of computing. By the late 1990s, however, Big Blue had managed to revive its reputation as a major computer manufacturer.

In the early days under chief executive Thomas Watson Jr. (1914–1993), IBM...