It's IBM's 100th birthday: How it survived and prospered  The
Associated Press By The Associated Press The Associated Press
Follow on Twitter on June 16, 2011 at 5:00 AM
ibmselectric.JPGView full sizeThe Selectric electric typewriter,
available in vivid orange, was a leading consumer product for
IBM in the 1960s. ENDICOTT, N.Y. -- Google, Apple and Facebook
get all the attention. But the forgettable everyday tasks of
technology -- saving a file on your laptop, swiping your ATM
card to get 40 bucks, scanning a gallon of milk at the checkout
line -- that's all IBM.      With a plant in Endicott, N.Y., the
new business also made cheese slicers and -- significantly for
its future -- machines that read data stored on punch cards. By
the 1930s, IBM's cards were keeping track of 26 million
Americans for the newly launched Social Security program.  These
old, sprawling machines might seem quaint in the iPod era, but
they had design elements similar to modern computers. They had
places for data storage, math processin