The International Business Machines Corporation is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, with operations in over 170 countries. The company began in 1911, founded in Endicott, New York, as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company and was renamed "International Business Machines" in 1924. IBM is incorporated in New York. IBM produces and sells computer hardware and software, provides hosting and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology. IBM is a major research organization, holding the record for most U. S. patents generated by a business for 27 consecutive years. Inventions by IBM include the automated teller machine, the floppy disk, the hard disk drive, the magnetic stripe card, the relational database, the SQL programming language, the UPC barcode, dynamic random-access memory; the IBM mainframe, exemplified by the System/360, was the dominant computing platform during the 1960s and 1970s. IBM has continually shifted business operations by focusing on higher-value, more profitable markets.

This includes spinning off printer manufacturer Lexmark in 1991 and the sale of personal computer and x86-based server businesses to Lenovo, acquiring companies such as PwC Consulting, SPSS, The Weather Company, Red Hat. In 2015, IBM announced that it would go "fabless", continuing to design semiconductors, but offloading manufacturing to GlobalFoundries. Nicknamed Big Blue, IBM is one of 30 companies included in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and one of the world's largest employers, with over 350,000 employees, known as "IBMers". At least 70% of IBMers are based outside the United States, the country with the largest number of IBMers is India. IBM employees have been awarded five Nobel Prizes, six Turing Awards, ten National Medals of Technology and five National Medals of Science. In the 1880s technologies emerged that would form the core of International Business Machines. Julius E. Pitrap patented the computing scale in 1885. On June 16, 1911, their four companies were amalgamated in New York State by Charles Ranlett Flint forming a fifth company, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company based in Endicott, New York.

The five companies had offices and plants in Endicott and Binghamton, New York. C.. They manufactured machinery for sale and lease, ranging from commercial scales and industrial time recorders and cheese slicers, to tabulators and punched cards. Thomas J. Watson, Sr. fired from the National Cash Register Company by John Henry Patterson, called on Flint and, in 1914, was offered a position at CTR. Watson joined CTR as General Manager 11 months was made President when court cases relating to his time at NCR were resolved. Having learned Patterson's pioneering business practices, Watson proceeded to put the stamp of NCR onto CTR's companies, he implemented sales conventions, "generous sales incentives, a focus on customer service, an insistence on well-groomed, dark-suited salesmen and had an evangelical fervor for instilling company pride and loyalty in every worker". His favorite slogan, "THINK", became a mantra for each company's employees. During Watson's first four years, revenues reached $9 million and the company's operations expanded to Europe, South America and Australia.

Watson never liked the clumsy hyphenated name "Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company" and on February 14, 1924 chose to replace it with the more expansive title "International Business Machines". By 1933 most of the subsidiaries had been merged into one company, IBM. In 1937 IBM's tabulating equipment enabled organizations to process huge amounts of data, its clients including the U. S. Government, during its first effort to maintain the employment records for 26 million people pursuant to the Social Security Act, the tracking of Jews and other persecuted groups by Hitler's Third Reich through the German subsidiary Dehomag; the social security-related business gave an 81% increase in revenue from 1935 to 1939. In 1949 Thomas Watson, Sr. created IBM World Trade Corporation, a subsidiary of IBM focused on foreign operations. In 1952 he stepped down after 40 years at the company helm, his son Thomas Watson, Jr. was named president. In 1956 the company demonstrated the first practical example of artificial intelligence when Arthur L. Samuel of IBM's Poughkeepsie, New York, laboratory programmed an IBM 704 not to play checkers but "learn" from its own experience.

In 1957 the FORTRAN scientific programming language was developed. In 1961 IBM developed the SABRE reservation system for American Airlines and introduced the successful Selectric typewriter. In 1963 IBM employees and computers helped. A year it moved its corporate headquarters from New York City to Armonk, New York; the latter half of the 1960s saw IBM continue its support of space exploration, participating in the 1965 Gemini flights, 1966 Saturn flights and 1969 lunar mission. On April 7, 1964, IBM announced the first computer system family, the IBM System/360. In 1967 Thomas John Watson, Jr. who had succeeded his father as chairman, announced that IBM would open a large-scale manufacturing plant at Boca Raton to produce its System/360 Model 20 midsized computer. On March 16, 1967, a headline in the Boca R

"My Heart Tells Me" is a song written by Harry Warren with lyrics by Mack Gordon. It is the theme to the 1943 American musical film Sweet Rosie O'Grady, in which it is sung by lead actress Betty Grable. A 1940s standard, the song has been recorded by numerous artists, including Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Nat King Cole, Etta Jones; the film's popularity contributed to the commercial success of the version of the song recorded by bandleader Glen Gray and his Casa Loma Orchestra with vocals by singer Eugenie Baird. Titled "My Heart Tells Me", it topped The Billboard's National Best Selling Retail Records chart for five weeks in 1944. In 1944, the song was performed by Glenn Miller with vocals in German by Johnny Desmond and broadcast by the American Broadcasting Station in Europe to German soldiers as part of the station's efforts to demoralize them

Susan Randi Wessler, ForMemRS, is an American plant molecular biologist and geneticist. She is Distinguished Professor of Genetics at the University of Riverside. Wessler graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1970, she received her bachelor's degree in 1974 in Biology from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and her Ph. D. in Biochemistry from Cornell University in 1980. She was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in the Department of Embryology from 1980-1982, she joined the faculty at University of Georgia in 1983 as an assistant professor of botany becoming a full professor in 1992. She was named Distinguished Research Professor in 1994 and Regents Professor in 2005. In 2006, Professor Wessler was named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor, she is a professor at large at the Keck Graduate Institute at the Claremont Colleges in Claremont, California. Her research focuses on identifying plant transposable elements and determining how they contribute to gene and genome evolution.

Her work has deciphered how transposable elements generate genetic diversity and attain high copy numbers without killing their host. Her laboratory demonstrated that elements could function as introns and that retrotransposons are the major cause of spontaneous insertion mutations in maize. In the genomics era her laboratory pioneered the computational analysis of transposable elements, culminating in the discovery of miniature inverted repeat transposable elements, the element most associated with plant genes; as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor, Wessler adapted her research program for the classroom by developing the Dynamic Genome Program where incoming freshmen experience the excitement of scientific discovery. Elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 2017 Elected member, American Philosophical Society Elected member, National Academy of Sciences Councilor, National Academy of Sciences and Home Secretary Elected fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science Elected fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences American Society of Plant Biologists' Stephen Hales prize FASEB Excellence in Science Award McClintock Prize for Plant Genetics and Genome Studies