The IBI started its activities in 1961 and it was soon overwhelmed by the speed of technological developments to the point that in 1969 it was about to become defunct due to a lack of content.
The member countries of the IBI at the time when it had the most members were the following: Algeria, Argentina, Benin, Bolivia, Brazil, Burkina Faso (formerly the Republic of Upper Volta), Cameroon, Colombia, Congo, Costa Rica, Cuba, Chile, Ecuador, Egypt, France, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea, Haiti, Iraq, Italy, Ivory Coast, Jordan, Lebanon, Liberia, Madagascar, Mali, Morocco, Mexico, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Panama, São Tomé and Príncipe, Senegal, Spain, Syria, Swaziland, Togo, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, Zaire.
With these objectives, the ICC organized the first International symposium on Economics of Automatic Data Processing in October 1965, held in Amsterdam, (The Netherlands).
In November 1975 it organized an international symposium on "National Planning for Informatics in Developing Countries" in Baghdad (Iraq).
From 1976 onward IBI-ICC organized a series of workshops on the study of policies and strategies in informatics that were held in Punta Ala and in Venice, (Italy).
The SPIN Conference was organized by the IBI-ICC and the UNESCO with the support of the Spanish Government and took place in September 1978 in Torremolinos, (Spain) with the participation of 86 countries, among them the "big powers", the US and the USSR.
In Africa IBI-ICC organized the first African Conference on Informatics in Abidjan (Ivory Coast) in 1979, followed by a second held in Dakar (Senegal) in 1983.
The CREI (the Regional Centre for the Teaching of Informatics) was opened in Madrid (Spain) in 1976, in collaboration with the Spanish Government and its activities continued until 1997.
In 1983, IBI-ICC, with the Argentinean government, created a foundation in Argentina for starting what would be later called the ESLAI (Latin-American school for informatics), providing it with initial funding.
The IBI also dealt with other areas of informatics and its applications to the industrial sector, for which it created a research centre in Valencia (Spain) together with the Spanish government, the IBIDI.
In order to achieve this it organized and financed a committee, the COARIN, for the adaptation of Arabic written characters to the ASCII code which, at that time, proved very difficult.
Among other publications put out by the IBI is the AGORA magazine published between 1981 and 1986 with 15 editions dedicated to subjects on informatics in a changing world.
[4] The financial situation having become untenable, the IBI decided to ends its activities in its 4th extraordinary session in 1987, and nominated a Liqudation Committee for that purpose.
By these claims, the U.S. blamed ISI for the fall in equipment sales to developing countries, and were displeased by IBI's projects in Nicaragua and Cuba, for which the U.S. government threatened commercial reprisals in Brazil between 1986 and 1988.