Ever since Apple introduced the first commercially successful microcomputer in 1976, TIME has been faithfully chronicling the fortunes of the many small electronics companies that all seem to have been conceived in garages and nutured around Boston or in California's Silicon Valley. This week's cover story, however, looks in another direction. It treats a very large, relatively old, traditional high-tech company, headquartered in New York's Hudson Valley, that has staged a spectacularly successful invasion of the personal-computer market: IBM, the once and future colossus. Says Business Editor George M. Taber, who supervised the story: "After telling the troubles of corporate behemoths like General Motors and U.S. Steel, it is refreshing to describe a major American company that is very successful. IBM is a giant that does just about everything right."

Staff Writer John Greenwald, working on his first cover, agrees. Says he: "IBM is one of the great stories in U.S. business." Before joining TIME in November 1981, Greenwald was for four years business editor of the Minneapolis Star, where he gained a special perspective on IBM. "The Twin Cities area is home to three of the other major computer manufacturers, Control Data, Honeywell and Univac," says Greenwald. "Anyone doing anything in computers faces the formidable task of competing with IBM, and I came to learn a lot about IBM just by observing how the other companies coped with its dominance."

The principal reporting for the story was done by New York Correspondent Bruce van Voorst, who spent five weeks talking with senior executives at IBM's headquarters in Armonk, N.Y., visiting two of the company's major manufacturing centers, and surveying the views of industry consultants and Wall Street analysts. Van Voorst faced several challenges on the assignment, not all of them journalistic. For one thing, he says, "IBM is a large and swiftly moving target. A list I made of two weeks of its activities would be many another company's annual report." Another problem was IBM's penchant for secrecy. "You learn what they want to tell you," he observes. "They could teach the CIA a thing or two." Finally, as a result of a ruptured Achilles' tendon suffered on a squash court, Van Voorst was temporarily disabled. Says he: "It is embarrassing to start an interview by asking permission to put your cast up on the subject's office coffee table." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.