The Service Bureau Corporation (SBC) had its origins in 1932 as the Service Bureau Division within

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

and was spun off as a wholly owned subsidiary in 1957 to operate IBM's burgeoning service bureau businesses. IBM had operated service bureaus in major cities beginning in the 1920s allowing users to rent time on tabulating equipment, and later computing equipment, to solve problems which couldn't justify a full-time equipment lease. In 1956, as a result of a

consent decree A consent decree is an agreement or settlement that resolves a dispute between two parties without admission of guilt (in a criminal case) or liability (in a civil case). Most often it is such a type of settlement in the United States. The ...

with the

United States Department of Justice The United States Department of Justice (DOJ), also known as the Justice Department, is a United States federal executive departments, federal executive department of the U.S. government that oversees the domestic enforcement of Law of the Unite ...

, IBM spun off its service bureaus to force them to operate at "arms length" from the parent company. In 1968 IBM transferred its Information marketing Division to SBC. This included the CALL/360

time-sharing In computing, time-sharing is the Concurrency (computer science), concurrent sharing of a computing resource among many tasks or users by giving each Process (computing), task or User (computing), user a small slice of CPU time, processing time. ...

service, QUIKTRAN,

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, and DATATEXT (a text processing system similar to ATS). In 1973, to settle a multi-year lawsuit charging anti-competitive behavior in IBM's pre-announcement of a nonexistent high-end System/360 Model 92, IBM sold SBC for $16 million to

Control Data Corporation Control Data Corporation (CDC) was a mainframe and supercomputer company that in the 1960s was one of the nine major U.S. computer companies, which group included IBM, the Burroughs Corporation, and the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), the N ...

, which had a growing service bureau business of its own.

References

External links

Photo – Rome (IT) service bureau in 1962

American companies established in 1932 American companies disestablished in 1973 Computer companies established in 1932 Computer companies disestablished in 1973 Defunct computer companies of the United States Defunct computer hardware companies Former IBM subsidiaries Time-sharing companies {{compu-company-stub