IBM is 100 years old today. It struck me that I worked for IBM for one third of this time! It was a good company to work for and much more than a technology company. The IBM 100 web sites list lots of the company's interesting achievements. As well as lots of technical ones there were many early employment and management innovations that were later adopted by other organisations. IBM employed its first disabled employee in 1914, it had an equal employment opportunity policy from 1953, well before the legislation required it.
The technical innovations are significant, too: early commercial digital computers, the PC, the floppy disk, the selectric (golfball) typewriter, the term 'word processing', fractal geometry, the scanning tunnelling microscope, laser surgery and the UPC barcode. Have a look at the IBM 100 icons of progress web site
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