Service Bureau Corporation
| Company type | Subsidiary |
|---|---|
| Industry | Service bureau, computing services |
| Predecessor | IBM's Service Bureau Division |
| Founded | 1932 |
| Fate | Divested to Control Data Corporation in 1973 |
| Parent | IBM (until 1973) |
The Service Bureau Corporation (SBC) was initially established in 1932 as IBM's Service Bureau Division and later became a wholly owned subsidiary in 1957 to oversee IBM's growing service bureau activities.
Since the 1920s, IBM had maintained service bureaus in key urban centers, enabling customers to lease time on tabulating machines and eventually computing devices for tasks that did not require full equipment ownership. As a result of a 1956 consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice, IBM separated its service bureaus to function independently from the main corporation.
In 1968, IBM assigned its Information Marketing Division to SBC, which included offerings such as the CALL/360 time-sharing platform, QUIKTRAN, BASIC programming language, and DATATEXT—a text processing system comparable to IBM's Administrative Terminal System.
By 1973, following litigation accusing IBM of anti-competitive practices related to the premature announcement of a non-existent System/360 Model 92, IBM divested SBC for $16 million to Control Data Corporation, a company looking to expand its own service bureau operations.