IBM Logo

IBM's current "8-bar" logo was designed in 1972 by graphic designer Paul Rand. It was a general replacement for a 13-bar logo that first appeared in public on the 1966 release of the TSS/360. Logos designed in the 1970s tended to be sensitive to the technical limitations of photocopiers, which were then being widely deployed. A logo with large solid areas tended to be poorly copied by copiers in the 1970s, so companies preferred logos that avoided large solid areas. The 1972 IBM logos are an example of this tendency. With the advent of digital copiers in the mid-1980s this technical restriction had largely disappeared; at roughly the same time, the 13-bar logo was abandoned for almost the opposite reason – it was difficult to render accurately on the low-resolution digital printers (240 dots per inch) of the time. The company wrote the IBM initials using individual atoms in 1990, as a demonstration of using a scanning tunneling microscope to move atoms. This was the first structure ass