[dantle]

It's harder to imagine coming from the IBM of today, but historically the company has earned many laurels from its numerous important contributions to computing. As my computer architecture professor used to say, "everything that's worth inventing already has been at IBM." In addition to RISC, they created out-of-order, superscalar processing, relational databases, TCM, magnetic hard discs, DRAM, etc.

[kkylin]

IBM Research also supported a number of first rate scientists. Just a couple of the better known names: Mandelbrot and Landauer worked there, and Charles Bennett still works there I think.

[pfdietz]

Cuprate superconductors were discovered by Bednorz and Müller at IBM in Zurich in 1986. They got the Nobel for it the next year. The physics Nobel the previous year also went to researchers at IBM Zurich, for the invention of atomic force microscopy.