Technology History | IBM — Four Shops Folded in Endicott

People treat IBM as an Armonk campus that always sold computers.

The first holding company made clocks, scales and punched cards.

On 16 June 1911 Charles R. Flint incorporated the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in New York.

The certificate put the principal office in the Town of Endicott, Broome County.

Flint bundled International Time Recording, the Computing Scale Company of America, the Tabulating Machine Company and Bundy Manufacturing.

The four shops employed about 1,300 people in Endicott, Dayton, Detroit, Washington and Toronto.

ITR's brick plant on North Street, begun by Harlow Bundy in 1904 and occupied from 1906, became the manufacturing core.

Thomas J. Watson Sr. arrived from NCR in 1914.

The company took the name International Business Machines on 14 February 1924, a title already used by the Canadian unit.

The 1911 prospectus reported combined net earnings of $950,000 for the year ended 30 April 1911.

The mechanism Flint sold was a lease-and-card business, not a stored-program computer.

The original Bundy block still stands inside the former North Street campus. Later sheds have come down around it.

Photo: One of the original buildings at the IBM Endicott campus, via Wikimedia Commons.