Category: Companies

Compaq Computer Corporation was founded in February 1982 by Rod Canion, Jim Harris and Bill Murto, three senior managers who left Texas Instruments and invested $1,000 each to form their own company. Sketched on a paper place mat in a Houston pie shop, the first product was a portable personal…

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From Philips “History” The foundations for what was to become one of the world’s biggest electronics companies were laid in 1891 when Gerard Philips established a company in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, to manufacture incandescent lamps and other electrical products. The company initially concentrated on making carbon-filament lamps and by the…

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Steven Wozniak and Steven Jobs had been friends in high school. They had both been interested in electronics, and both had been perceived as outsiders. They kept in touch after graduation, and both ended up dropping out of school and getting jobs working for companies in Silicon Valley. ( Woz…

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Zilog was founded in 1974 and became a wholly owned subsidiary of Exxon Corp. by 1980. The company’s management and employees purchased Zilog back from Exxon in 1989. Zilog became a publicly-held company in February, 1991. In March of 1998, Zilog was privatized, as a result of the merger and…

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Atari got its start in the consumer electronics side of home entertainment with its release of Pong for the home. Originally Atari had planned to build 50,000 units, however Atari was approached by Sears and ended up making 150,000 for the Christmas 1975 season. People stood in line for nearly…

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Begun in 1969 by Allen-Bradley, MOS Technology originally was a supplier for Atari, but in 1975 they joined with ex-Motorola engineers to design and build low cost CPUs that performed better than leading CPUs like the Motorola 6800. The first MOS chip, the 6501, was four times faster than the…

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 From Intel’s “Corporate Overview”; For more than three decades, Intel Corporation has developed technology enabling the computer and Internet revolution that has changed the world. Founded in 1968 to build semiconductor memory products, Intel introduced the world’s first microprocessor in 1971. Today, Intel supplies the computing and communications industries with…

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Edson deCastro was a former product manager at DEC, creators of the PDP series of computers. He left the company to form Data General and in 1968 they produced the Nova, competing directly with deCastro’s former employers. Although considered crude in comparison, the system was fast for it’s day and…

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Tandy was originally formed in 1919 by Norton Hinckley and Dave L. Tandy, and was known as the Hinckley-Tandy Leather Company. In 1963 it bought Radio Shack, paving the way for the company to be part of the computer revolution in the 1970s. In 1977 it introduced the TRS-80 to…

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