The Service Bureau Corporation (SBC) had its origin in 1932 as the Service Bureau Division within IBM and was spun off as a wholly owned subsidiary in 1957 to operate IBM's burgeoning service bureau businesses. IBM had operated

service bureau A service bureau is a company that provides business services for a fee. The term has been extensively used to describe technology-based services to financial services companies, particularly banks. Service bureaus are a significant sector within t ...

s in major cities beginning in the 1920s allowing users to rent time on tabulating equipment, and later computing equipment, to solve problems which couldn't justify a full-time equipment lease. In 1956, as a result of a consent decree with the

United States Department of Justice The United States Department of Justice (DOJ), also known as the Justice Department, is a federal executive department of the United States government tasked with the enforcement of federal law and administration of justice in the United Stat ...

, IBM spun off its service bureaus to force them to operate at "arms length" from the parent company. In 1968 IBM transferred its Information marketing Division to SBC. This included the CALL/360

time-sharing In computing, time-sharing is the sharing of a computing resource among many users at the same time by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking.DEC Timesharing (1965), by Peter Clark, The DEC Professional, Volume 1, Number 1 Its emergence ...

service,

QUIKTRAN QUIKTRAN is a Fortran-like, interactive computer programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. ...

, BASIC, and DATATEXT (a text processing system similar to ATS). In 1973, to settle a multi-year lawsuit charging anti-competitive behavior in IBM's pre-announcement of a nonexistent high-end System/360 Model 92, IBM sold SBC for $16 million to Control Data Corporation, which had a growing service bureau business of its own.

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Photo – Rome (IT) service bureau in 1962

American companies established in 1932 American companies disestablished in 1973 Computer companies established in 1932 Computer companies disestablished in 1973 Defunct computer companies of the United States Former IBM subsidiaries Time-sharing companies {{compu-company-stub