A LARGE NUMBER of books and scholarly articles have been published about IBM, and the company has received continuous extensive press coverage for decades. While a definitive bibliography of studies of the company would run to scores of book titles and even more articles, this bibliographic essay will point out key works. For a detailed bibliography, however, along with an account of many archival sources, consult Jeffrey R. Yost, ed., The IBM Century: Creating the IT Revolution (Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society, 2011). It is also an anthology of articles written by IBM employees about the history of the firm. The endnotes in my history of IBM cite other sources, such as internal IBM publications, newspaper and magazine articles, and archival materials. IBM has a well-organized corporate archive, and the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota has many business collections relevant to this company’s history. Also not to be overlooked are the Watson Papers at New York University.
A few general histories of IBM exist, although all are out of date because they were published years ago and we know so much more today about all periods of the company’s past. See Robert Sobel, IBM, Colossus in Transition (New York: Times Books, 1981); Saul Engelbourg, International Business Machines: A Business History (New York: Arno, 1976 reprint of 1954 dissertation); James W. Cortada, Before the Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs, and Remington Rand and the Industry They Created, 1865–1956 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); and Emerson W. Pugh, Building IBM: Shaping an Industry and Its Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). Two more current accounts that discuss IBM as part of the computer industry are Jeffrey R. Yost, The Computer Industry (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2005), and Martin Campbell-Kelly and Daniel D. Garcia-Swartz, From Mainframes to Smartphones: A History of the International Computer Industry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). IBM published a history on the occasion of its centennial celebration, Kevin Maney, Steve Hamm, and Jeffrey M. O’Brien, Making the World Work Better: The Ideas That Shaped a Century and a Company (Upper Saddle River, NJ: IBM Press, 2011).
On IBM’s relations with the U.S. government and the computer industry, there are excellent studies. The most useful include D. M. Hart, “Red, White, and ‘Big Blue’: IBM and the Business-Government Interface in the United States, 1956–2000,” Enterprise and Society 8, no. 1 (2007): 1–34, which includes a useful account of IBM’s lobbying efforts; D. M. Hart, “IBM in American Politics, 1970–1999,” Business and Economic History 28, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 49–59; Steven W. Usselman, “IBM and Its Imitators: Organizational Capabilities and the Emergence of the International Computer Industry,” Business and Economic History 22, no. 2 (1993): 1–35; and Steven W. Usselman, “Unbundling IBM: Antitrust and the Incentives to Innovation in American Computing,” in The Challenge of Remaining Innovative: Insights from Twentieth-Century American Business, ed. S. N. Clarke, N. Lamoreaux, and S. Usselman (Stanford, CA: Stanford Business School Books, 2009), 249–279, which provides an excellent analysis of IBM’s antitrust problems. For contemporary comments regarding IBM, see International Data Corporation, IBM and the Courts: A Six Year Journal (Framingham, MA: IDC, 1975).
The most useful biography of Herman Hollerith is Geoffrey D. Austrian, Herman Hollerith, Forgotten Giant of Information Processing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). For more on his work and his tabulating machines, consult Lars Heide, Punched-Card Systems and the Early Information Explosion, 1880–1945 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). The two books should be consulted in tandem, along with Cortada, Before the Computer. On Thomas J. Watson Sr., the definitive biography is Kevin Maney, The Maverick and His Machine: Thomas J. Watson, Sr. and the Making of IBM (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2003), but also see Richard S. Tedlow, The Watson Dynasty: The Fiery Reign and Troubled Legacy of IBM’s Founding Father and Son (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), which includes discussion about the role of his son Thomas J. Watson Jr. One of the best business memoirs written by an American executive is by Tom Jr., covering the 1930s through the early 1970s. See Thomas J. Watson Jr. and Peter Petre, Father, Son & Co.: My Life at IBM and Beyond (New York: Bantam, 1990). Other personal accounts discuss IBM of the 1920s through the 1980s, such as for the 1920s to 1940s. See Walter D. Jones, “Watson and Me: Life at IBM,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 24, no. 1 (2002): 4–18. On the 1930s to 1950s, see Ruth Leach Amonette, Among Equals: A Memoir. The Rise of IBM’s First Woman Corporate Vice President (Berkeley, CA: Creative Arts Books, 1999). On IBM in Latin America, see Luis A. Lamassonne, My Life with IBM (Atlanta: Protea, 2000). On the 1950s to 1960s, see W. W. Simmons with R. B. Elsberry, Inside IBM: The Watson Years, a Personal Memoir (Pittsburgh: Dorrance, 1988). On the 1970s and 1980s, see James W. Cortada, “Carrying a Bag: Memoirs of an IBM Salesman, 1974–1981,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 34, no. 4 (October–December 2013): 32–47. On the 1970s to 1980s, see Milton Drandell, IBM: The Other Side. 101 Former Employees Look Back (San Luis Obispo, CA: Quait, 1984); David Mercer, The Global IBM: Leadership in Multinational Management (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1988); and the most familiar to historians of IBM, Emerson W. Pugh, Memories That Shaped an Industry: Decisions Leading to IBM System 360 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984).
On IBM’s technology, the key works on the earliest period are those by Austrian and Heide cited earlier. On mainframes, see Charles J. Bashe, Lyle R. Johnson, John H. Palmer, and Emerson W. Pugh, IBM’s Early Computers (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), and Emerson W. Pugh, Lyle R. Johnson, and John H. Palmer, IBM’s 360 and Early 370 Systems (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), both of which look at technological, institutional, and manufacturing aspects of technology development and production. To understand how IBM’s machines fit into the broader history of computing, the essential study is Paul E. Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). A major study about how to run computer projects based on IBM’s experiences of the 1960s is Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1975). On the role of IBM’s AS/400 of the 1980s, see R. A. Bauer, E. Collar, V. Tang, J. Wind, and P. Houston, The Silverlake Project: Transformation of IBM (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Finally, on the role of services at IBM and other firms for most of the second half of the twentieth century, see Jeffrey R. Yost, Making IT Work: A History of the Computer Services Industry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017).
In studies of the antitrust suit of the 1960s and 1970s, economics received considerable attention. In defense of IBM’s market behavior, see Franklin M. Fisher, James W. McKie, and Richard B. Mancke, IBM and the U.S. Data Processing Industry: An Economic History (New York: Praeger, 1983); Franklin M. Fisher, John J. McGowan, and Joen E. Greenwood, Folded, Spindled and Mutilated: Economic Analysis and U.S. vs. IBM (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983). For a study critical of IBM, see Richard Thomas DeLamarter, Big Blue: IBM’s Use and Abuse of Power (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1986). For a broader discussion of IBM’s role as part of the U.S. government’s promotion of the computer industry in the 1950s to 1970s, see Kenneth Flamm, Creating the Computer: Government, Industry, and High Technology (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1988); Kenneth Flamm, Targeting the Computer: Government Support and International Competition (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1987); and an often overlooked economic analysis of IBM’s performance in the 1950s and 1960s, Alvin J. Harman, The International Computer Industry: Innovation and Comparative Advantage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).
There does not yet exist a full history of personal computers, although journalists have commented on IBM’s PC and more broadly about the company in the 1980s and early 1990s, linking the company’s woes of the period to its PC business. These include Paul Carroll, Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM (New York: Crown, 1994), criticizing how IBM managed its PC business; Robert Heller, The Fate of IBM (Boston: Little, Brown, 1994), blaming IBM’s troubles in the early 1990s on its mismanagement of the PC business; and Rex Malik, And Tomorrow … The World? Inside IBM (London: Millington, 1976), examining World Trade and centralized IBM management. For a forecast that IBM would go out of business, see Charles H. Fergusson and Charles R. Morris, Computer Wars: How the West Can Win in a Post-IBM World (New York: Times Books, 1993). For an in-depth study of the making of IBM’s PC at the start of the 1980s, James Chposky and Ted Leonis, Blue Magic: The People, Power, and Politics Behind the IBM Personal Computer (New York: Facts on File, 1988), remains an excellent study. See also Jon Littman, Once Upon a Time in Computerland (Palo Alto, CA: HP Trade, 1987). A useful early study of PC computing is Paul Freiberger, Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999). For a detailed study of IBM and its rivals, see Rod Canion, Open: How Compaq Ended IBM’s PC Domination and Helped Invent Modern Computing (Dallas: BenBella, 2013).
On the broader theme of IBM’s managerial practices, consult David B. Yoffie, Strategic Management in Information Technology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1994), 271–289. On the firm’s business and product strategy, demonstrating how IBM surged in the 1950s to 1970s, see Alfred D. Chandler Jr., Inventing the Electronic Century: The Epic Story of the Consumer Electronics and Computer Industries (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 82–215. D. Quinn Mills and G. Bruce Friesen, Broken Promises: An Unconventional View of What Went Wrong at IBM (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1996), argues that IBM in the 1980s and 1990s got into trouble for reducing quality service to customers and for breaking its long-term full-employment practices, becoming arrogant and losing touch with its constituencies. Personnel practices have drawn attention from others, too, such as D. L. Stebenne, “IBM’s ‘New Deal’: Employment Policies of the International Business Machines Corporation, 1933–1956,” Journal of the Historical Society 5, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 47–77. For a study based on employee surveys done at IBM between 1967 and 1973, see Geert Hofstede, Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1980). For a later study on related themes, see Leonard Greenhalgh, Robert B. McKensie, and Rodrick Gilkey, Rebalancing the Work Force at IBM: A Case Study of Redeployment and Revitalization (Cambridge, MA: Sloan Management School, 1985). For a study by an anthropologist who examined IBM’s role in Endicott, New York, see Peter C. Little, Toxic Town: IBM, Pollution, and Industrial Risks (New York: New York University Press, 2014). For a book on IBM’s management practices covering the decades of the 1950s to 1980s and written by a company sales executive, see Buck Rodgers with Robert L. Shook, The IBM Way: Insights into the World’s Most Successful Marketing Organization (New York: Harper and Row, 1986).
When historians discuss management practices of a corporation, they inevitably also deal with the issue of corporate culture. Useful for framing issues related to IBM are Kenneth Lipartito, “Business Culture,” in The Oxford Handbook of Business History, ed. Geoffrey Jones and Jonathan Zeitlin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 603–628, which also includes an excellent bibliography; Terrence E. Deal and Alan A. Kennedy, Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1982); and Jacques Rojot, “Culture and Decision Making,” in The Oxford Handbook of Organizational Decision Making, ed. Gerard P. Hodgkinson and William H. Starbuck (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Those studies should, however, be framed within the larger context of contemporary history. For my IBM history, I found the following useful: essays in Peter Hertner and Geoffrey Jones, eds., Multinationals: Theory and History (Aldershot: Gower, 1986); Glenn Porter, The Rise of Big Business, 1860–1920 (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1992); Geoffrey Jones, Multinationals and Global Capitalism: From the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Youssef Cassis, “Big Business,” in The Oxford Handbook of Business History, ed. Geoffrey Jones and Jonathan Zeitlin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), and other essays in this volume. Alfred D. Chandler Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), remains essential reading.
On what it was like to work at IBM in the middle decades of the twentieth century, several memoirs are useful. These include Jacques Maisonrouge, Inside IBM: A Personal Story (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988), written by a French IBMer who became CEO of World Trade. The original French edition, Manager International (Paris: Editions Robert Laffont, 1985), has slightly different content. Both laud the firm. For insights on engineering at IBM, see Garth Lambert, Fifty Years in Information Systems (No city: LuLu Press, 2005, 2006), covering the 1950s through the 1990s. On product development in the 1950s to 1970s, see George J. Laurer, Engineering Was Fun! An Autobiography (No city: LuLu Press, 2006, 2007), but it should be consulted in tandem with a similar memoir by Joseph C. Logue, “From Vacuum Tubes to Very Large Scale Integration: A Personal Memoir,” Annals of the History of Computing 20, no. 3 (July–September 1998): 55–68.
The period of IBM’s decline in the 1980s and early 1990s and revival in the later 1990s has been the subject of investigation by journalists and one IBMer. These include three well-informed studies: Robert X. Cringely (a journalist whose name is a pseudonym for Mark Stephens), The Decline and Fall of IBM: End of an American Icon? (Lexington, KY: NeRDTV, 2014), which, while negative, also offers suggestions on how the company can improve, largely by returning to its previous culture and behaviors; Peter E. Greulich (a retired IBM manager), A View from Beneath the Dancing Elephant: Rediscovering IBM’s Corporate Constitution (Austin, TX: MBI Concepts, 2014); and Peter E. Greulich, THINK Again!: IBM Can Maximize Shareholder Value (Austin, TX: MBI Concepts, 2017), his most thorough analysis of the company’s financial and business performance. IBM’s CEO of the 1990s also published his memoirs of his time at IBM. See Louis V. Gerstner Jr., Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?: Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround (New York: HarperBusiness, 2002). Two studies by journalists review the Gerstner period. See Robert Slater, Saving Big Blue: Leadership Lessons and Turnaround Tactics of IBM’s Lou Gerstner (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999), and Doug Gaar, IBM Redux: Lou Gerstner and the Business Turnaround of the Decade (New York: HarperBusiness, 1999). Both are useful, detailed studies of IBM in the 1990s.
There is no full history of IBM World Trade, although it is discussed in bits and pieces in many of the sources cited earlier. On IBM in Europe and how it worked at its corporate headquarters in New York, there are the previously cited Maisonrouge memoirs, Inside IBM. The following excellent, although dated, study by a journalist remains an essential source: Nancy Foy, The Sun Never Sets on IBM: The Culture and Folklore of IBM World Trade (New York: William Morrow, 1975). On the 1950s to 1970s, see James W. Cortada, The Digital Flood: The Diffusion of Information Technology across the U.S., Europe, and Asia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). On IBM’s relations with Hitler, there is the controversial book by Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation (New York: Crown, 2001), and on IBM’s post–World War II activities in Germany, see Corinna Schlombs, “The ‘IBM Family’: American Welfare Capitalism, Labor, and Gender in Postwar Germany,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 39, no. 4 (October–December 2017): 12–26. A series of studies add to our understanding of IBM’s role. See Steven W. Usselman, “Selecting Flexible Champions: Markets, Firms, and Public Policies in the Evolution of Computing in the U.S., U.K., and Japan,” Journal of Business Studies (Ryukoku University) 35, no. 1 (June 1995): 27–43. On European debates, see Magnus Johansson, “Big Blue Gets Beaten: The Technological and Political Controversy of the First Large Swedish Computerization Project in a Rhetoric of Technology Perspective,” Annals of the History of Computing 21, no. 2 (1999): 14–30; Corinna Schlombs, “Engineering International Expansion: IBM and Remington Rand in European Computer Markets,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 30, no. 4 (October–December 2008): 42–58; Petri Paju, “National Projects and International Users: Finland and Early European Computerization,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 30, no. 4 (October–December 2008): 77–91; Pierre E. Mounier-Kuhn, L’Informatique de la seconde Guerra mondiale au Plan Calcul en France: L’émergence d’une science (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2010); Pierre E. Mounier-Kuhn, “Sur L’Histoire de L’Informatique en France,” Engineering Science and Education Journal 3, no. 1 (February 1995): 37–40; Pierre E. Mounier-Kuhn, “Product Policies in Two French Computer Firms: SEA and Bull (1948–64),” in Information Acumen: The Understanding and Use of Knowledge in Modern Business, ed. Lisa Bu-Frierman (London: Routledge, 1994), 113–135; Alain Beltran, “Arrivée de l’informatique et organization des enterprises françaises (fin des années 1960–début des années 1980),” Enterprises et histoire 60 (September 2010): 122–137; François Hochereau, “Le movement de l’informatisation d’une grande entreprise. Les visions organisantes successives d’un processus d’activité stratégique,” Enterprises et histoire 60 (September 2010): 138–157; Alfonso Molina, “The Nature of Failure in a Technological Initiative: The Case of the Europrocessor,” Technological Analysis and Strategic Management 10, no. 1 (March 1998): 23–40. For issues central to the study of global diffusion of IT, see Cortada, The Digital Flood. Finally, a useful account, but nearly impossible to find copies of, is James Connolly, History of Computing in Europe (Paris: IBM World Trade Corporation, 1967). Another book written by an IBM employee that is worth consulting is David Mercer, IBM: How the World’s Most Successful Corporation Is Managed (London: Kogan Page, 1987). On the early years of World Trade, not to be missed is Petri Paju and Thomas Haigh, “IBM Rebuilds Europe: The Curious Case of the Transnational Typewriter,” Enterprise and Society 17, no. 2 (June 2016): 265–300. On IBM France, see Chroniques de la Compaignie IBM France, 1914-1987 (Paris: IBM Corporation, 1988).
On the European “national champion” programs and how IBM was part of the topic, there is a large body of literature, including Margaret Sharp, ed., Europe and the New Technologies: Six Case Studies in Innovation and Adjustment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986); ed. Richard O. Hundley,, The Future of the Information Revolution in Europe: Proceedings of an International Conference (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2001); Richard Coopey, “Empire and Technology: Information and Technology Policy in Postwar Britain and France,” in Information Technology Policy: An International Perspective, ed. Richard Coopey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 144–168; Eda Kranakis, “Politics, Business, and European Information Technology Policy: From the Treaty of Rome to Unidata, 1958–1975,” in Information Technology Policy: An International Perspective, ed. Richard Coopey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 209–246; Dimitris Assimakopoulos, Rebecca Marschan-Piekkari, and Stuart MacDonald, “ESPRIT: Europe’s Response to US and Japanese Domination of Information Technology,” in Information Technology Policy: An International Perspective, ed. Richard Coopey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 247–263; James W. Cortada, ”Public Policies and the Development of National Computer Industries in Britain, France, and the Soviet Union, 1940–80,” Journal of Contemporary History 44, no. 3 (2009): 493–512; Pascal Griset, “Du ‘temps réel’ aux premiers réseaux: une entreprise rêvée, une informatique à l’épreuve du quotidian (des années 1970),” Enterprises et Histoire 60 (September 2010): 98–121; Gerard Alberts, “Appropriating America: Americanization in the History of European Computing,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 32, no. 2 (April–June 2010): 4–5; Arthe Van Laer, “Developing an EC Computer Policy, 1965–1974,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 32, no. 1 (January–March 2010): 44–59. Less consulted, but informed by economic and factual analysis, are Raimund Vollmer, Mythos IBM: Aufbruch ins nächste Jahrtausend, vol. 1, Irrungen und Wirrungen (Reutlingen: Verlag Blank-Vollmer, 1987), the earlier Henry Bakis, I.B.M.: Une multinationale régionale de Grenoble (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1977), and contemporaneous and with a German perspective, Hermonn Relboldt and Raimund Vollmer, Der Markt sind Wir: Die IBM und ihre Mitbewerber (Stuttgart: Buchmagazin Verlag Computer-Buch-und Hobby GmbH, 1978). Also useful is William Rodgers, THINK: A Biography of the Watsons and IBM (New York: Stein and Day, 1972). On IBM’s later role in Europe, see Roger Adraï, IBM: L’Héritage dilapidé? (Montrouge: Éditions John Libbey, 1994).
For a discussion of how many historians discussed IBM there is James W. Cortada, “Change and Continuity at IBM: Key Themes in Histories of IBM,” Business History Review 92, no. 1 (2018): 117–148.