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Follow UsBANGALORE, INDIA: Twenty five years may be an insignificant time period if we were to compare it with the lessons we take in history. There are many companies that deserve the accolades for achieving this. So here, we'll simply pay a tribute to those companies and some of their achievements that have completely changed our lives for the better. Presented here are those companies sorted from oldest to newest.
The Centenarians
Xerox Corporation
Still known for photo-copying, Xerox started off as a manufacturing company which produced photogenic paper and equipment, but is known for contributing many significant inventions to the IT industry from its PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) facility. The center is known for having developed many significant inventions like laser printing, the GUI (adopted and commercially sold by Apple as Lisa first and later as the Macintosh), Ethernet (the de-facto standard in LANs today), object-oriented programming, the concept of ubiquitous computing, and many others.
Nokia Corporation
Nokia is actually an industrial conglomerate with a history that dates back all the way to 1865, when it came into being with its pulp and paper manufacturing business. The seeds of Nokia as we know it today, were actually planted in 1960. Nokia has been credited as one of the main companies involved with the development of the GSM standard that is capable of carrying data and voice traffic. The world's first GSM mobile phone was a Nokia product known as the Nokia 1011 and it was launched in 1992.
Siemens
Founded in 1847 in Germany, Siemens is an integrated technology company offering solutions for the fields of industry, energy and healthcare, and is acknowledged as the largest electronics and electrical engineering in Europe.
Visionaries: 1920 to Pre-1970s
Bell Labs
This is one company that gave a slew of inventions to the world of modern computing. It built a number of revolutionary technologies like the UNIX operating system, the C and C++ programming languages, the transistor, the laser, and radio astronomy. UNIX became the base for a lot of operating systems, while C became the mother of all modern day programming languages.
Motorola
Motorola has many firsts to its credit. In 1973, the company, developed the first hand-held mobile phone, which weighed about 1 kg. Ten years later in 1983, Motorola mass produced and sold the world's first commercial mobile phone called the DynaTAC. This was an analogue mobile phone. In 1995, the world's first 2 way pager was also a Motorola product. In June 2000, world's first GPRS cell phone was developed by Motorola in collaboration with Cisco. Motorola was divided into Motorola solutions and Motorola Mobility, with the latter division getting acquired by Google in 2011.
Hewlett-Packard Company
Many firsts are credited to HP, which include the world's first desktop scientific calculator, the world's first scientific hand-held calculator, etc. HP has been particularly prominent in the printing space, with its laser and inkjet printing range.
Sony Corporation
The biggest contribution by this electronics giant is invention of the compact disc (CD) which became a de-facto standard for software distribution. Sony was also instrumental in developing the Blu-Ray disc and Disc players which are touted to be the future of optical media because of the sheer storage capacity and longevity of the product.
Intel Corporation
Intel created the world's 1st commercial microprocessor chip, the 4004 in 1971. The power of this thumbnail sized microprocessor was about the same as the room-sized ENIAC. IBM first used an upgraded version of this microprocessor in the IBM PC. The rest as they say is history, with the microprocessor becoming ever more powerful year after year, and with it, the PC, which has completely changed our lives.
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The Era of Transition --1970s
Western Digital
WDC started off as a company which manufactured calculator chips. Its other famous inventions also include the microcoded CPU, the first single-chip floppy disk controller, and first single-chip ATA hard disk controller.
Microsoft
The software giant doesn't require any introduction, with a slew of successful products that have revolutionized computing and impacted our every day lives-DOS, Windows, Office, Zune, Xbox Kinect, IE, Bing etc. It's said that when Windows 95 was launched, there were queues outside retail stores on the previous night to buy the product. It is said that the company sold $30 Million worth of copies of Windows 95 on the first day itself, and a million copies in the first four days of its launch.
Oracle Corporation
According to Oracle, it was the world's first software company to develop and deploy 100 percent Internet-enabled enterprise software across its entire product line: database, server, enterprise business applications, applications development and decision support tools.
Apple
Apple gave the world its first GUI (Lisa), introduced many products that built communities no less powerful than religions cults, like the iPod that killed other MP3 players, the iPhone that took the mobile phone market by surprise with its completely touch screen technology, the iMac that completely re-defined the desktop, and now the iPad.
Seagate
A company that has been a storage player ever since its inception has many firsts to its credit, including the industry's first 7200 rpm HDD, the first 10,000 and 15000 RPM HDD, first Fibre Channel interface hard drive, etc. Seagate was the first to ship one billion hard drives in 2008.
Novell
The company that really kicked in the client/server computing era was Novell, with its multi-platform network operating system, NetWare. In just a decade, the company had a monopoly in the x86 based network OS market. Another major innovation by Novell was its Novell Directory Services or NDS.
Adobe
Adobe systems revolutionized the desktop publishing business with Adobe PostScript, which was targeted at a new and beautiful method of printing text and images. Adobe is a company characterized through its ground breaking products like Illustrator and Photoshop, which raised the bar in terms of quality of print and video.
1990s --The Online Era
Amazon.com
Amazon can be credited with the tag of being the first e-commerce company and pioneering the online retail business. Amazon started housing products in warehouses and selling them through its online website. The company initially only sold books through its online store but the recent line of products include books, music, videos, consumer electronics, clothing and household products.
Yahoo!
The 'Yet Another Heirarchical Officious Oracle', short for Yahoo! was brought into existence by two Stanford Electrical Engineering graduates-David Filo and Jerry Yang. It was created as a website named “David and Jerry's guide to the WWW”.
Google came at a time when the Internet market was flooded with many different and powerful search engines, like Yahoo!, Altavista, Lycos, etc all trying to gain the top spot. In a short span of time, the search algorithms created by Google's founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page completely overtook others and dominated the Internet. Google is amongst the most valuable brands and rated as amongst the best companies to work for. Beyond search engines, Google is also known for Gmail, Google Docs, Google Earth, and Android.