Category Archives: Companies

The Burroughs Corporation found itself part of computing history in 1953 when it moved into computers for the banking industry. By the 1960s the company had risen to the top of the computing heavyweights, competing with IBM, GE, and RCA in the mainframe market.

Like IBM, Burroughs produced all of their own systems and peripherals including printers, disk drives, and more. The architecture of a Burroughs machine was based what is called language directed design, and used instruction sets that could be done with COBOL or FORTRAN. The company went on to produce a slew of popular and innovative computers and business machines until 1986, when it was merged with Sperry Corporation to form Unisys, which is still producing computers and providing a whole range of IT services as of 2016.

Radio Shack was founded in Boston by brothers Theodore and Milton Deutschmann in 1921. Aimed at the growing field of amateur/ham radio, they opened a storefront and mail order business and named it after the common nickname for the location of a ship’s radio equipment. The first catalog was published in 1939, and by the 1950s the company was selling it’s own branded products.

It grew and expanded stores until the 60s when it went nearly bankrupt. It was bought for a mere $300,000 by the CEO of Tandy Corporation in 1962. Tandy continued to own and operate the Radio Shack stores until it’s spectacular spiral into bankruptcy in 2015, filing for Chapter 11 in February.  Along the way, the firm was responsible for some of the most influential tech of the 70s and 80s, including the TRS-80 computer and countless parts, wire, radio gear, and more sold over the years to hobbyists.

The online social network Facebook was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard University. Originally it was a student-only site that provided “hot or not” type interaction based on student photos originally called “Facemash”. The site as the world really knows it today launched on Feb. 4th as thefacebook.com. It was expanded in scope later to other colleges and eventually high schools, and went on to become the social giant that it is today.

The site and Zuckerberg has faced much controversy, including charges against Zuckerberg by Harvard for hacking and a lawsuit filed by three other students for allegedly misleading them about a similar project. The case was eventually settled for shares of Facebook stock. Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster, became president after advising Zuckerberg for a time and Facebook moved to Palo Alto, California. The site then became facebook.com after purchasing the domain for $200,000. Finally, in September of 2006 the site was made available to anyone over the age of 13.

Today, Facebook is the world’s largest social media app, reaching over 1.3 billion users in June, 2014. The company later went public in a popular IPO in Feburary, 2012. The company has also become innovators in data center and web application technology, building custom infrastructure to handle the massive load of users on systems.

One of the world’s largest computer and electronics manufacturers. NEC Technologies is the second largest producers of semiconductors behind Intel, and its line of monitors has set the standard for many years. It also produces PCs and notebook computers, and controls half the PC market in Japan.

America Online (AOL) and Time Warner announce the largest corporate merger in U.S. history, a transaction valued at $183 billion on the day it is made public. The takeover marks the first time a new corporate giant created by the Internet boom uses the “new economy” value of its stock to acquire an older Fortune 500 company. The new AOL Time Warner becomes the fourth-largest company in the United States and is valued at $342 billion.

From Googles’ “What’s a Google?”

Googol is the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. It’s a very large number.

Google is a company with a very large number of users, and a laser-like focus on finding the right answer for each and every one of them more than 200 million times a day.

A Google user might be a woman in Atlanta trying to decide what car to buy. Or a doctor in Osaka looking for the latest study on an unusual illness. Or maybe a business executive in London researching a competitor.

A Google user could be a webmaster looking for ways to increase the usefulness of her website or a marketing director in search of better ROI for his ad budget.

The tool they have all chosen to help them is the Google search engine, an easy-to-use online service that scours more than a billion web pages for pertinent information.

In every case Google provides an answer that is unique to the user and uniquely useful. An answer that is delivered quickly and guaranteed to be relevant and clear. And because Google does this better than any other online service, Google users have made it the fastest growing, most used search engine in the world.

From Lycos’ Company Overview

Terra Lycos is one of the leading Internet companies in the world, with a significant global presence and a clear focus on profitability and growth. The company’s main goal is profitable growth, which it aims to achieve by efficiently managing resources and by obtaining recurrent revenue from paying subscribers. Due to the company’s commitment to innovation and customer satisfaction the number of paying subscribers continues to grow.

To consolidate its position as the leading portal in Spain and Latin America and one of the principal Internet companies in the U.S. and Europe, Terra Lycos continues to develop innovative, value-added services and products and exploit these on a global scale.

From Ebay’s Company Overview

Founded in September 1995, eBay is The World’s Online Marketplace for the sale of goods and services by a diverse community of individuals and businesses. Today, the eBay community includes tens of millions of registered members from around the world. People spend more time on eBay than any other online site, making it the most popular shopping destination on the Internet.

What started as Earth’s biggest bookstore is rapidly becoming Earth’s biggest anything store. A simple project that started in one man’s garage, Amazon.com’s main Web site offers millions of books, and numerous other services and merchandise.

3dfx Interactive was founded in 1994 as an OEM supplier of video graphics manufacturers and for a time was THE graphics company of the 90s. In 1996, the famous Voodoo card was introduced, putting 3dfx at the top of the video card heap with it’s then cutting edge video acceleration. It notably lacked an onboard VGA controller, but that didn’t stop gamers from using the card to get the latest and greatest video performance. The video game Quake by id Software helped propel the Voodoo cards into popularity which was designed with the card in mind.

Other 3dfx cards included the Voodoo Rush in 1997, Voodoo 2 and Voodoo Banshee in 1998, and subsequently,  Voodoo 3, 4, and 5. In 1997, 3dfx was involved in a very public battle with Sega over the development of the next gen Dreamcast console. The company declined in the late 90s due to many debatable reasons, and was acquired by it’s rival NVIDIA in early 2000.