International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), nicknamed "Big Blue," is the world's largest information technology company, as well as one of the world's leading supplier of computer-related products and services. Headquartered in Armonk, New York, IBM produces just about every type of equipment needed for information processing, storage, and retrieval.

IBM owes its beginning to three events occurring around 1890—the Industrial Revolution, the United States population expansion, and the inability of the Census Bureau to adequately count the population. Hoping to discover a more efficient way to count the census, American statistician Herman Hollerith invented the punched-card tabulating machine. With "punched-card" processing and Hollerith's machine the Census Bureau completed its census in three years, saving over five million dollars. With this success, Hollerith formed the Tabulating Machine Company in 1896. The company merged with the Computing Scale Company of America and the International...