Pretty special? They were making guns and selling computation tools to the Nazis for a bunch of those years.
I think they trade now mostly on legacy maintenance contracts (e.g. for mainframes) for e.g. banks who are terrified of rocking their technology-stack-boat, and selling off-shore consultants (which is at SIGNIFICANT risk of disruption - why would you pay IBM squillions to do some contract IT work, when we have AI code agents? Probably why the CEO is out doing interviews saying you cant trust AI to be around forever)
I have not really seen anything from IBM that signals they are anything other than just milking their legacy - what have they done that is new or innovative in the past say 10 or 20 years?
I was a former IBMer 15 odd years ago and it was obvious then that it was a total dinosaur on a downward spiral, and a place where innovation happened somewhere else.
# companies 100+ years old / # companies ever existed in 100+ years
Then you will see why IBM is pretty special and probably knows what they are doing.