Websites

For an overview of 1950’s IBM commercial computers, check out the “IBM Catches Up” page on the Computer History Museum site. This page, also on the Computer History Museum site, offers a family tree of IBM mainframes, useful for translating the haze of acronyms and numbers that IBM seemed to be so fond of.

Videos

WatchMojo.com offers a short video called “The History of IBM: The Personal Computer to Watson,” which provides a brief overview of the corporation and its accomplishments over the years.  

For an insider look at the Company, turn to “What Changes and What Endures, an IBM Centennial Lecture,” in which IBM CEO Samuel Palmisano discusses the reasons why IBM has remained relevant and profitable for a century.

This half-hour documentary, “Inside IBM EDA: Fifty Years of Innovation,” is an IBM-produced look into the history of Electronic Design Automation at Big Blue – that is, the use of computers to design computers. Well-produced but technical.

Articles

From the 1930s through the 1960s – during the “New Deal Ordeal” – IBM operated in complex networks of domestic socio-political transition, international war and peace, and shifting business and political alliances. Learn more about the changing corporate cultures of IBM and other major computer companies in historian Thomas Haigh’s concise and well researched article, “Computing the American Way: Contextualizing the Early US Computer Industry.”