IT companies and organisations

 

  • 3Com: Founded by Bob Metcalfe, the father of Ethernet technology in 1979. The name 3Com represents computers, communication and compatibility.
  • Adobe: Adobe was founded in 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke, employees of Xerox PARC where they were developing a page description language (PDL) called InterPress which Xerox was very reluctant to commercialise. The name Adobe came from Adobe Creek that ran behind the house of Warnock in Los Altos, California. Adobe released PostScript, a powerful and flexible PDL in 1984. Adobe's wide range of products include the Portable Document Format (PDF) along with Distiller and Acrobat, Photoshop & Imageready, PageMaker (originally developed by Aldus), Illustrator, FrameMaker. For more info see Jones Encyclopedia page on Adobe Systems, Adobe Inc. Company Profile.
  • America Online (AOL): AOL was founded as Quantum Computer Services by Steve Case in 1985. It got the new name in 1989. Links: History of AOL.
  • Apple: founded by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne in 1976 and incorporated in 1977 as Apple Computer, Inc. In 2007, the word 'Computers' from the name. Links: Wikipedia on Apple, 10 Apple Trivia Questions.
  • Autodesk: Founded in 1982 by John Walker and 12 of his associates. Brought CAD to the PCs.
  • Cisco: Founded in 1984 by Sandra Lerner and Leonard Bosack, both from Stanford University. Legend has it that they stumbled upon the need to invent routers because they could not otherwise send love letters via email across the different computer networks in their respective departments.
  • Compaq: Compaq Computer Corporation was founded in February 1982 by Rod Canion, Jim Harris and Bill Murto, three senior managers who left Texas Instruments. The first product was a portable personal computer, which was able to run all software then available for the IBM PC.
  • Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was started by Ken Olsen in 1957. Their focus was on minicomputers like the highly successful PDP-8, PDP-11 and the VAX-11. DEC was acquired by Compaq in 1998. Compaq, in turn, was acquired by HP in 2002.
  • Hewlett Packard (HP): Founded on January 1, 1939 by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, electrical engineers from Stanford University. The company's name was decided with a coin toss! HP's first product was the resistance-capacity audio oscillator (HP 200A), an electronic instrument used to test sound equipment. HP introduced the HP 9100A, the world's first desktop scientific calculator, in 1969. The HP-35, released in 1972, was the world's first scientific handheld calculator.
  • IBM: The Tabulating Machines Company was founded in 1896 by Herman Hollerith, an US Statistician, who is also credited with the invention of punched cards. In 1911, TMC merged with the International Times Recording Company, Dayton Seale Company and Bundy Manufacturing Company to form the Computing, Tabulating and Recording Company (C-T-R). C-T-R was renamed as International Business Machines (IBM) on February 14, 1924.
  • Microsoft: Started by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1977. It was first named Micro-soft. The hyphen was later dropped. One of the first applications that they wrote was the BASIC interpreter for the ALTAIR.
  • Motorola: founded by Paul V. Galvin as the Galvin Manufacturing Corporation in 1928. The name Motorola was given in 1947. The name was first used as a brand name for car radios which the company marketed in 1930s.
  • Netscape: Founded in March 1994 by Marc Andreesen (who wrote Mosaic, the first graphical Web browser) along with SGI founder Jim Clark and Erin Bina (also on the Mosaic team). It was first named as 'Mosaic Communications Corporation.' Link: History of Netscape.
  • NeXT: Started by Steve Jobs 1985, when he left Apple. The company produced UNIX workstations.
  • Oracle Corporation: In 1977, Lawrence J. (Larry) Ellison, Robert N. (Bob) Miner and Ed Oates formed a company called Software Development Laboratories (SDL) and bid successfully on a top-secret contract code-named Oracle for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The project died and in 1978, SDL developed the first version of Oracle for the DEC PDP-11, which was never publicly released. In the same year (1978), SDL became Relational Software Incorporated (RSI) and in 1979, Oracle v2 for the PDP-11 was publicly released. It was the first ever Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) based on the relational database model published by Dr. E F Codd (and sponsored by IBM) in 1970. In 1983, RSI changed its name (possibly due to general confusion associated with a competitor company called RTI) to Oracle Systems Corporation, which was later shortened to Oracle Corporation. Sources and links: oracle.com: History of Oracle, FAQ about Oracle Corporation (orafaq.org), Article at informit.com on Oracle History.
  • Seagate: Manufactures Hard disks. Originated the concept of SCSI (Small Computer System Interface).
  • Sun Microsystems: Sun was originally an acronym for Stanford University Network! The company was incorporated in February 1982 with four employees. The four were Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla, Andreas Bechtolsheim (all three from Stanford University) and Bill Joy.
  • Texas Instruments (TI): Founded on May 16, 1930 as Geophysical Service by J. Clarence 'Doc' Karcher and Eugene McDermott as a specialist in siesmological exploration of oil and incorporated in New Jersey as Geophysical Service Inc. (GSI) on December 23, 1938 with Eugene McDermott as Chairman and Erik Jonsson as President. The name changed to Coronado Corporation in 1939, with GSI as a subsidiary. The company started work in electronics for US Army and Navy in 1942, and in January 1951, the company name was changed to General Instruments Incorporated, and GSI became a wholly owned subsidiary. In the same year, it was renamed Texas Instruments Inc. with Eugene McDermott as Chairman and Erik Jonsson as President. Early innovations include the first commercial silicon transistor in 1954, first commercial transistor radio, Regency in 1954, and first integrated circuit (IC) by Jack Kilby in 1958. Links: Changing the Name to Texas Instruments, Key Innovations at TI, About TI, at ti.com.
  • Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), which opened on July 1, 1970, is one of the temples of computing advances. The GUI and related concepts like menus and icons, Object Oriented Programming, laser printers, Ethernet and client-server computing are just of the few technologies that were invented here. PARC became an independent company PARC Inc. on January 4, 2002. Links: www.parc.com, History of PARC.

 


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