The Corporate Giants of the Earth

American Telephone & Telegraph and International Business Machines are the Brobdingnagians of business and tower over their industries. Both have dominated their fields by sound management, outstanding products and sheer size. Portraits of the two titans:

From its headquarters in New York City, AT&T controls assets of $137 billion, more than those of Exxon, General Motors and U.S. Steel combined, and more than the gross national products of all but 20 nations. A T & T's resources include 24,000 buildings, 177,000 motor vehicles and 142 million telephones, or eight out of every ten phones in the U.S. The company's 1 million employees make up almost 1% of the American work force, a level that no other company even approaches. It has 3 million shareholders, more than any other firm.

AT&T was formed in 1885, nine years after Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. The firm's network of wires began snaking westward from around Hartford, Conn., and New York City. The company now has a total of some 1.7 billion miles of cable, microwave radio and satellite circuits that form the heart of U.S. telecommunications.

The company's vast network is the source of its unique power. The American public would be virtually unable to make a telephone call without AT&T. The firm has therefore been regulated by federal and state governments ever since it was founded. And although it is part of American tradition to complain about the phone company, the U.S. still enjoys the world's best telephone service.

No company has done more to change the way America works than International Business Machines Corp. Founded in 1911, IBM soon came to dominate the market for time clocks and punch-card tabulators. In the 1930s it pioneered the sale of electric typewriters. But its most revolutionary feat was to usher in the computer age. With vision and drive, IBM increased the electronic brain power of American business and then spread that boon around the world. In the 1960s and '70s, roughly two-thirds of all computers sold bore the IBM trademark. The company was so overpowering that the eight major computer firms were commonly known as IBM and the Seven Dwarfs.

IBM is not renowned for technological innovation and did not even introduce the business computer. That honor belongs to Remington Rand, which unveiled UNIVAC in 1951. But IBM quickly produced its own machine and marketed it with a huge, tireless sales and service force. This was the personal army of Thomas Watson Sr., a sales genius who started his career peddling organs and sewing machines and wound up heading IBM from 1914 until his death in 1956. Watson ordered his troops to wear white shirts and post the famous THINK signs in their offices. They worked hard to discover what products businesses wanted, and were tough to beat on fast service for a blown computer circuit.

That kind of energy inspired the customer loyalty that has made IBM the eighth largest U.S. industrial corporation. Only oil and auto companies are bigger. Last year IBM had earnings of more than $3 billion, the largest for any American manufacturing company. Though hordes of aggressive smaller companies are chipping away at its dominion, IBM will be the colossus of the computer industry far into the future.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.