International Business Machines Corporation (abbreviated IBM and also nicknamed "Big Blue") is a multinational computer technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, NY, USA. The company is one of the few information technology companies with a continuous history dating back to the 19th century.

IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and offers infrastructure services, hosting services, and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to Nan technology.

IBM has been known through most of its recent history as the world's largest computer company; with over 355,000 employees worldwide, IBM is the largest information technology employer in the world. It is also the most profitable, but in revenues it fell to second place behind Hewlett Packard in 2007.

IBM holds more patents than any other U.S. based technology company. It has engineers and consultants in over 170 countries and IBM Research has eight laboratories worldwide.

IBM employees have earned three Nobel Prizes, four Turing Awards, five National Medals of Technology, and five National Medals of Science. As a chip maker, IBM is among the Worldwide Top 20 Semiconductor Sales Leaders.




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ENIAC
ENIAC performed ballistics trajectory calculations with 160 kW of power.
The US-built ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first electronic general-purpose computer. Built under the direction of John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, it was 1,000 times faster than its contemporaries. ENIAC's development and construction lasted from 1943 to full operation at the end of 1945.

When its design was proposed, many researchers believed that the thousands of delicate valves (i.e. vacuum tubes) would burn out often enough that the ENIAC would be so frequently down for repairs as to be useless. It was, however, capable of up to thousands of operations per second for hours at a time between valve failures. It publicly validated the use of electronics for large-scale computing. This was crucial for the development of modern computing.

ENIAC was unambiguously a Turing-complete device. A "program" on the ENIAC, however, was defined by the states of its patch cables and switches, a far cry from the stored program electronic machines that evolved from it. To program it meant to rewire it. (Improvements completed in 1948 made it possible to execute stored programs set in function table memory, which made programming less a "one-off" effort, and more systematic.)
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