Many tech companies these days obsess over constantly redesigning and tweaking their logos. In that context, IBM’s 43-year-old logo is veritably the branding equivalent of ancient sacred scripture.

Its iconic eight-bar logo is the marquee for IBM’s awakening to the power of design in the 1950s. The story goes that after seeing a particularly compelling store display of Olivetti typewriters in New York City, IBM’s then newly installed CEO, Thomas J. Watson, Jr. had an epiphany. “Good design is good business,” he declared. It became the company’s mantra and mandate and signaled a profound design-conscious evolution in the company’s operations. Until then, IBM reflected the conservative taste of Watson’s father who founded the company, an aesthetic that the younger Watson compared to a “first-class saloon on an ocean liner.”

Guided by Eliot Noyes, an architect who was the curator of industrial design at the Museum of Modern Art at that time, Watson sought to overhaul IBM’s image from a nondescript corporation that sold punch-card timekeeping machines, data-storage diskettes, and tabulating machines (with a rather generic name too—International Business Machines) to a company with a modern sensibility, a distinct character and a colorful lore, much like Olivetti.

The IBM logo was designed by the pioneering graphic designer and art director Paul Rand, who is celebrated for translating the tenets of European modernism to American corporate communications—introducing motifs from Bauhaus, Cubism, de Stijl, and Constructivism in his commercial work. Until the Brooklyn-bred designer came to the scene, most advertising work was controlled by copywriters.

Along with Eero Saarinen, Isamu Noguchi, and Charles and Ray Eames (pdf), Rand was part of the design dream team that Noyes assembled for IBM. Aligning with Watson’s treatise on good design, Rand understood that a distinguishing mark was essential to a company’s success. “In the competitive world of look-alike products, a distinctive company logotype is one if not the principal means of distinguishing one product from that of another,” Rand wrote in the introduction of IBM’s logo-usage manual. “The value of the logotype, which is the company’s signature cannot be overestimated.”