The main computer companies in 1971 were known as ‘IBM and the seven dwarfs’ – the seven dwarfs being Burroughs, Control Data, General Electric, Honeywell, RCA, Scientific Data Systems and UNIVAC.

1981 saw the birth of the IBM Personal Computer, offering 16 kilobytes of memory, one or two floppy disk drives and an optional colour monitor. The chip came from Intel, and the operating system, DOS, came from a small company called Microsoft. In 1985 the IBM token ring local area network was introduced.

The 1990s saw the PC revolution place computers in the hands of millions, and the Internet saw the market for client/server products. Purchasing decisions for the smaller computing systems fell into the hands of individuals and IBM began to lose market share. In 1993 it posted a loss of $8 billion. IBM quickly re-assessed its business strategy and today is again a market leader.