It is interesting in the history of computers and technology how some companies last many years and others are a flash and burn out quickly.
Whatever happened to Visicalc? WordPerfect? Commodore?
For a while, Compaq and Gateway were the rage. Now it seems to be Dell.
It should be noted that Hewlett Packard is a much older company, I believe dating back to the 1930s. They had mini-computers out by 1970.
I doubt younger readers ever heard of Remington Rand. This was a large company making business products. It took over the newly invented Univac and ERA groups and became Univac. It merged with another business giant, Burroughs to become Unisys. It's a much smaller company today.
Where are DEC (Digital/PDP) and CDC (Control Data Corporation)? What about Cray?
I date IBM to the start of Herman Hollerith's tabulating company in
1890, though I think IBM itself uses a later date when Thomas J. Watson Sr was hired as the new manager. (Watson was NOT the founder of IBM, it already existed. He built it up, though). By the way, the IBM website has a history section exhibit on Tom Watson Jr, interesting stuff. Through ups and downs IBM is still a large company and very high up on the Fortune 500.It's strange that so many websites and articles refer to the "early days" and "antiques" of computers to only 30 years ago. The PC revolution was indeed a big change for society. However, the advent of computers in business was a much bigger change since it changed processing from pencil and automation. Even if at home we didn't have a computer, we were using one at work or businesses we visited used one. Even if the PC never was developed, many features we see, such as telephone inquiry, would still have come to pass supported by mainframes or minis. I submit the 40th Anniversary of System/360 was quite significant. '
The upcoming 50th anniverseary of the disk drive (this Sept 2006) is very significant since almost everything we do would be impossible without random access disk memory.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Lisa, we _need_ a good article on disk drives for our archives in the history section. Would you mind preparing one I could keep on file here? PAT]