IBM Research

IBM Research is the research and development division of IBM, the American multinational information technology company. It is headquartered at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, near the company's headquarters in Armonk, and it has laboratories on six continents. Its roots lie in the opening in 1945 of the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory at Columbia University, the first IBM laboratory devoted to pure science, and the Thomas J. Watson Research Center followed in 1961. Inventions credited to the division include the floppy disk, the hard disk drive, the magnetic stripe card, the relational database, the Universal Product Code, the Fortran programming language and the SABRE airline reservation system, and its contributions to physical science include the scanning tunneling microscope and high-temperature superconductivity, both of which were awarded the Nobel Prize. IBM employees have won six Nobel Prizes and seven Turing Awards.