The Harvard Mark I, or IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), was a general-purpose electromechanical computer used in the war effort during the last part of World War II.

One of the first programs to run on the Mark I was initiated on 29 March 1944 by John von Neumann. At that time, von Neumann was working on the Manhattan Project, and needed to determine whether implosion was a viable choice to detonate the atomic bomb that would be used a year later. The Mark I also computed and printed mathematical tables, which had been the initial goal of British inventor Charles Babbage for his "analytical engine" in 1837.

The Mark I was disassembled in 1959, but portions of it were displayed in the Science Center as part of the Harvard Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments until being moved to the new Science and Engineering Complex in Allston in July 2021. Other sections of the original machine had much earlier been transferred to IBM and the Smithsonian Institution.

International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is an American multinational technology corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, with operations in over 171 countries. The company began in 1911, founded in Endicott, New York, by trust businessman Charles Ranlett Flint, as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) and was renamed "International Business Machines" in 1924. IBM is incorporated in New York.IBM produces and sells computer hardware, middleware and software, and provides hosting and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology. IBM is also a major research organization, holding the record for most annual U.S. patents generated by a business (as of 2020) for 28 consecutive years.Inventions by IBM include the automated teller machine (ATM), the floppy disk, the hard disk drive, the magnetic stripe card, the relational database, the SQL programming language, the UPC barcode, and dynamic random-access memory (DRAM). The IBM mainframe, exemplified by the System/360, was the dominant computing platform during the 1960s and 1970s.

IBM is one of 30 companies included in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and one of the world's largest employers, with over 345,000 employees as of 2020.