IBM
International Business Machines, the company behind FORTRAN, the System/360, the relational model and SQL, the PC, and decades of computing research, founded as CTR in 1911 and renamed IBM in 1924.
Organizations
The labs and companies that shipped the languages and the tools.
50 entries, all primary-sourced
ISO (International Organization for Standardization)
The International Organization for Standardization, the global federation of national standards bodies that published the OSI Reference Model (ISO/IEC 7498) and many foundational information technology standards.
Commodore International
Jack Tramiel's company that bought chip maker MOS Technology, built the PET, VIC-20, and the best-selling Commodore 64, and pursued the slogan 'computers for the masses, not the classes.'
Digital Equipment Corporation
DEC, the minicomputer giant whose PDP and VAX/VMS machines were the hardware on which Unix and much early systems software grew up.
Bell Labs
The Bell System research laboratory in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where C, Unix, and the transistor were developed.
Borland
The software company, led by Philippe Kahn, that sold Turbo Pascal and later Turbo C and Delphi, and helped make low-cost professional development tools a mass market.
CERN
The European particle-physics laboratory where Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, and which placed the Web's software in the public domain in 1993.
Xerox PARC
Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, founded in 1970, where Ethernet, the Alto personal computer, the graphical user interface, laser printing, and Smalltalk were created.
Atari
Atari, founded in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, launched the commercial video-game industry with Pong and the 2600 console, then became a symbol of the 1983 video-game crash.
Microsoft
The company Bill Gates and Paul Allen started in 1975 selling a BASIC interpreter for the Altair, which became dominant through MS-DOS and Windows.
MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems)
MITS, Ed Roberts's Albuquerque company, built the Altair 8800 kit that launched the personal-computer industry and licensed Microsoft's first product, Altair BASIC.
Homebrew Computer Club
The Homebrew Computer Club, a hobbyist group that began meeting in Menlo Park in 1975, was an incubator of the personal-computer industry; its members, including Steve Wozniak, traded designs and ideas that seeded companies like Apple.
Apple Computer
Apple Computer was founded in 1976 by Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, and Ronald Wayne to sell Wozniak's Apple I single-board computer; over the next eight years it carried the personal computer from a hobbyist board to the mass-market Apple II and the graphical Lisa and Macintosh.
Tandy / Radio Shack
Tandy Corporation and its Radio Shack retail chain, the company whose nationwide store network turned the TRS-80 line into one of the first mass-market personal computers.
Oracle
The company that Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates founded in 1977 to build a relational database, and which grew into one of the largest enterprise software firms in the world.
Acorn Computers
The British company behind the BBC Micro and the Archimedes, and the birthplace of the ARM processor, which it spun out in 1990 as a joint venture with Apple and VLSI.
Berkeley Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG)
The UC Berkeley research group, funded by DARPA, that produced BSD Unix and its TCP/IP networking for two decades.
Sun Microsystems
The workstation and server company co-founded in 1982 that championed networked computing, SPARC, NFS, and Java.
Compaq Computer Corporation
Compaq, founded in 1982 by former Texas Instruments managers, shipped the first legal 100-percent IBM-compatible PC by reverse-engineering the BIOS in a clean room, launching the clone industry.
Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI)
The high-end 3D graphics workstation maker founded by Jim Clark in 1982, originator of IRIS GL and OpenGL, whose systems rendered Jurassic Park and Toy Story.
Adobe Systems
The software company founded in 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke, creators of PostScript, PDF, Illustrator, Photoshop, and Acrobat.
NeXT Computer, Inc.
The workstation company Steve Jobs founded in 1985 after leaving Apple; its NeXTSTEP operating system and object frameworks were acquired by Apple in 1996, bringing Jobs back and seeding Mac OS X and iOS.
Free Software Foundation
The nonprofit Richard Stallman founded in 1985 to advance computer user freedom, sponsor the GNU Project, and publish the GNU General Public License.
Pixar
The computer graphics company that grew out of Lucasfilm's Computer Division, built the Pixar Image Computer and the RenderMan renderer, and produced the first fully computer-animated feature film, Toy Story (1995).
Red Hat
The company that proved open source could be a billion-dollar business by selling subscriptions and support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux; it went public in 1999 and was acquired by IBM in 2019.
NVIDIA
Graphics-chip company founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem. It built the RIVA and GeForce lines, coined the term GPU with the GeForce 256 in 1999, and later opened the GPU to general-purpose computation with CUDA.
Netscape Communications
The company behind the Navigator browser and JavaScript, and a central player in the first browser war against Microsoft.
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
The standards body founded by Tim Berners-Lee in 1994 to coordinate open web standards such as HTML, CSS, and the DOM.
id Software
The Texas studio that defined the first-person shooter with Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake, pioneered shareware distribution for games, and established a long tradition of releasing its engine source code under the GPL.
VMware
The company founded in 1998 that made virtualization practical on commodity x86 hardware, enabling server consolidation and, indirectly, the cloud.
Open Source Initiative
The Open Source Initiative (OSI), founded in late February 1998 by Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens, is the steward of the Open Source Definition and runs the program that reviews and approves open source licenses.
Mozilla
The open-source project and foundation born when Netscape released its browser source code in 1998; it builds Firefox and helps steward open web standards.
Apache Software Foundation
The nonprofit formed in 1999 to support the Apache HTTP Server and many other open-source projects, a pillar of the open-source movement.
JetBrains
The developer-tools company founded in 2000 behind IntelliJ IDEA and the JetBrains IDE family, and the creator of the Kotlin programming language.
Creative Commons
The nonprofit founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessig and collaborators that built a suite of standardized, free copyright licenses, extending the free-software and copyleft idea from code to all of culture.
Android Inc.
Android Inc. was the startup founded in 2003 by Andy Rubin and others to build software for mobile devices. Google quietly acquired it in 2005, and its work became the Android operating system.
Canonical Ltd
The company Mark Shuttleworth founded in 2004 to develop and commercially support Ubuntu, funding free software development through subscriptions and professional services.
Eclipse Foundation
The independent, vendor-neutral not-for-profit established in 2004 to steward the Eclipse community, now hosting hundreds of open-source projects including the Eclipse IDE, Jakarta EE, and Adoptium.
WHATWG
The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group, founded in 2004 by Apple, Mozilla, and Opera, which revived HTML, produced HTML5, and maintains the HTML Living Standard.
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
The Internet Engineering Task Force is the open, volunteer-driven standards body that develops and maintains the core technical specifications of the internet, publishing its work as Requests for Comments.
Amazon Web Services
The cloud-computing arm of Amazon, launched in 2006, which created the public-cloud market and made rentable, on-demand infrastructure the default.
The Khronos Group
The open, non-profit industry consortium that stewards royalty-free graphics and compute standards including OpenGL, Vulkan, WebGL, glTF, and OpenCL.
The Linux Foundation
The nonprofit formed in 2007 by merging OSDL and the Free Standards Group; it sponsors Linux kernel development, employs Linus Torvalds, and today hosts hundreds of open-source projects including the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Kubernetes.
Twilio
The communications API company founded by Jeff Lawson that turned SMS, voice, and telephony into programmable cloud services, a pioneer of the API economy.
Google Cloud Platform
Google's public cloud platform, which began with the App Engine preview in 2008 and is known for Kubernetes, BigQuery, and data and AI services; the third major hyperscaler.
GitHub
The git-hosting platform launched in 2008 that turned open-source collaboration into a social activity built around the pull request; acquired by Microsoft in 2018.
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft's public cloud platform, announced in 2008 as Windows Azure and made generally available in 2010, now the second-largest hyperscaler and deeply tied to the enterprise and Windows ecosystems.
The Document Foundation
The independent, community-led nonprofit announced in 2010 to host LibreOffice after Oracle's acquisition of Sun left the OpenOffice.org community seeking a vendor-neutral home; it is a charitable foundation under German law.