How nine of the world’s largest tech companies got started

Many of today’s largest tech companies, such as Sony, Nokia, Samsung and IBM, have been around for a very long time (some since the 1800s). Their beginnings were often very humble, and it is fascinating to look back and see how they actually got started.

We selected nine of the world’s oldest and largest tech companies to see how and when they got started. As you will notice, many were initially doing completely different things from what they are doing today and have been active in a lot of different business areas.

Nokia – started in 1865

Nokia was founded by Fredrik Idestam in 1865 as a wood-pulp mill in south-western Finland. It was later relocated to the town Nokia where the company got its name. The name Nokia is an old Finnish word for a dark, furry animal (such as the sable).

In the beginning of the 20th century Finnish Rubber Works established its factories and began using Nokia as its brand. The companies merged in 1967 as Nokia Corporation, which went on to produce paper products, bicycle and car tires, footwear, personal computers, communication cables and televisions.

It wasn’t until 1987 that Nokia introduced one of the world’s first handheld phones, the Mobira Cityman 900. It “only” weighed 0.8 kg and cost €4,650.

Old Nokia footwear ad. (From Nokia.)

Sony – started in 1945

Sony started out as a radio repair shop in a bombed-out building in Tokyo right after World War II. The founder, Masaru Ibuka, was joined the next year by Akio Morita and together they founded Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K. (Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation).

The company tried on various acronyms and names, like Totsuko and Tokyo Teletech before finally settling for Sony in 1955. It is a mix of the Latin word “sonus” (sound) and the English word “sonny” (little boy).

Sony built Japan’s first tape recorder (the G-Type) and also the country’s first commercially produced transistor radio.

Japan’s first magnetic tape recorder, the G-Type (1950). (From Digital World Tokyo.)

IBM – started in 1896

IBM got its start under the name Tabulating Machine Company in 1896. Even before starting the company, the founder, Herman Hollerith, had filed a series of patents regarding punched card data processing.

A merger with two other companies later changed the name of the company to Computing Tabulating Recording (CTR) Corporation. It wasn’t until 1924 that the company changed its name to International Business Machines Corporation, or IBM.

The early years included a wide range of products such as employee time-keeping systems, weighing scales, automatic meat slicers and punched card equipment. During World War II IBM also produced weapons and its punch-card machines were used for calculations in the development of the first atomic bombs.

Tabulating Machine Corporation plant. (From Wikipedia.)

Samsung – started in 1938

Samsung was founded by Lee Byung-chul in 1938 as Samsung Store, a trading company in Daegu, (South) Korea, selling fish, vegetables and fruit to China. During the Communist invasion in 1950 his inventories were damaged and he was forced to leave and start over again in 1951, this time in Seoul.

In 1953 Lee opened a sugar refinery and founded his philosophy of making Samsung the leader in each industry he entered. Samsung later moved into several different businesses fields, providing things like insurances, department stores, radio and television stations, engineering and electronics.

Samsung even started a daily newspaper back in 1965. It is currently one of the three largest in Korea, although no longer affiliated with Samsung.

Samsung’s founder, Lee Byung-chul. (From an article about Korean Chaebols.)

Nintendo – started in 1889

Nintendo was founded in 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi in Kyoto. He started out with producing handmade Hanafuda cards, which is a type of playing cards. The name Nintendo supposedly means “Leave luck to Heaven” when translated from Japanese to English.

Before becoming a video game company Nintendo tried several niche businesses, setting up a love hotel chain, a taxi company, a TV network and a food company for selling instant rice.

Nintendo Hanafuda card including the Nintendo logo at the time. (From Wikipedia.)

Hewlett-Packard – started in 1935

Hewlett-Packard (HP) was founded in a garage in 1935 by William Hewlett and David Packard. At first they couldn’t decide if the company should be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett, but after a coin toss that Packard won he decided on Hewlett-Packard.

Their first product was a precision audio oscillator. One of their earliest customers was The Walt Disney Company which bought eight oscillators to use in certifying surround sound systems installed in theaters for the movie Fantasia.

HP continued to make electronic test equipment and later also experimented with using their equipment together with DEC minicomputers. They ultimately decided that it would be easier to make their own computers than dealing with DEC.

In 1968 HP launched what is known as one of the first personal computers, although they called it a desktop calculator because according to Bill Hewlett: “If we had called it a computer, it would have been rejected by our customers’ computer gurus because it didn’t look like an IBM.”

The original protype for HP’s audio oscillator. (From HP.)

Motorola – started in 1928

Motorola was founded in Chicago as Galvin Manufacturing Corporation in 1928 by Paul and Joseph Galvin. The first product was a battery eliminator for radios.

The name Motorola was adopted in 1930 when the company started to produce car radios. The name is a combination of “motor” and “Victrola.” (The Victrola was an early record player.)

Motorola has provided radio equipment for most NASA space-flights including the 1969 moon landing.

Motorola log from way back. (From World’s Best Logos.)

Siemens – started in 1847

Siemens was founded in 1847 by Werner von Siemens but was then called Telegraphen-Bauanstalt von Siemens & Halske. The company’s first invention was based on the telegraph but used a needle to point to a sequence of letters instead of using Morse code.

In 1867 Siemens completed the monumental Indo-European telegraph line between Calcutta and London. Siemens also powered the world’s first electric street lighting in the town of Godalming, UK, using a watermill. They later also diversified into electric trains and light bulbs, among other things.

The Siemens & Halske Electric Railroad, shown at the Berlin Industrial Exhibition in 1879. (From Some Early Traction History.)

Canon – started in 1930

The company that would become Canon was founded by Goro Yoshida and Saburo Uchida (Yoshida’s brother-in-law) and was funded by a close friend, Takeshi Mitarai. The goal of Precision Optical Instruments Laboratory, as the company was initially called, was to develop a 35mm rangefinder camera.

In 1934 the company started marketing a camera called the Kwanon, but none of the Kwanon cameras ever reached the market. The name Kwanon (and its later spelling, Kannon) was taken from a famous Buddhist (bodhisattva). The year after, the company started using the product label Canon instead, which was more modern-sounding and also means “authoritative scriptures” in English.

The Hansa Canon camera, released in 1936, was the company’s first success. The camera used a lens from the predecessor of Nikon (Japan Optical Industries).

In 1937 the company name was changed to Canon.

The 1934 Kwanon logo. (From Wikipedia.)

We hope you enjoyed this look back at the early history of these huge tech companies. It is interesting to think that every year, companies get started that have the potential to become huge in the future, just like the ones here have risen heads and shoulders above the vast majority of companies that started around the same time.

The history of Computer hardware

We all use personal computers and we all take them for granted in our everyday lives. It’s easy to forget that PCs have only been around for a couple of decades, and initially were nowhere near the powerhouses we have on our desks today.

The first computer mouse

The first computer mouse was invented in 1963 by Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute. (He is also one of the inventors of hypertext.) The first mouse used two wheels positioned at a 90-degree angle to each other to keep track of the movement (see picture below). The ball mouse wasn’t invented until 1972, and the optical mouse was invented circa 1980 although it didn’t come to popular use until much later.
Douglas Engelbart never received any royalties for his invention and his patent had run out by the time the mouse became commonplace in the era of home PCs.


Above: The first mouse. To the right you can see the wheels it used for movement and positioning.

The first trackball

The trackball was actually invented 11 years BEFORE the mouse, in 1952. It was invented by Tom Cranston and Fred Longstaff as part of a computerized battlefield information system called DATAR, initiated by the Canadian Navy. It used a standard five-pin bowling ball as its trackball, which is smaller than the more common 10-pin bowling ball.


Above: The first trackball, bowling ball and all.

The first portable computer

Well, perhaps that should be “movable” computer… The IBM 5100 Portable Computer was introduced in 1975, weighed 25 kg (55 lb), was the size of a small suitcase and needed external power to operate. It held everything in the same unit, packing in a processor, ROM (several hundreds of KB) and RAM (16-64 KB), a five-inch CRT display, keyboard and a tape drive, which was an amazing feat at the time. It also came with built-in BASIC and/or APL. The different models of the IBM 5100 sold for $8,975 – $19,975.


Above: The IBM 5100 Portable Computer.

The first laptop computer

The first laptop computer (or notebook) was the Grid Compass 1100 (called the GRiD) and was designed in 1979 by a British industrial designer, Bill Moggridge. The computer didn’t start selling until 1982, then featuring a 320×200 screen, an Intel 8086 processor, 340 KB of magnetic bubble memory (a now obsolete, non-volatile memory type) and a 1200 bps modem. It weighed 5 kg (11 lb) and cost $8-10,000. The GRiD was mainly used by NASA and the US military.


Above left: Closeup of the Grid Compass 1100. Above right: NASA astronaut posing with the GRiD in space (that’s Spock on the screen.)

The first IBM PC

The IBM Personal Computer was introduced in 1981 as the IBM 5150. The platform became so pervasive in the 80s that although the term “personal computer” had been in use since the early 70s, a PC became synonymous with an IBM PC-compatible computer.
During its development, the IBM 5150 had been internally referred to as “Project Chess” and was created by a team of 12 people headed by Don Estridge and Larry Potter. To speed up development and cut costs, IBM had decided to use off-the-shelf parts, something that they normally wouldn’t do.
The first IBM PC had an Intel 8088 processor, 64 KB of RAM (extendible to 256 KB), a floppy disk drive (which could be used to boot the computer with a rebranded version of MS-DOS (PC-DOS)) and a CGA or monochrome video card. The machine also had a version of Microsoft BASIC in ROM. On the first IBM PC the optional 10 MB hard disk drive could only be installed if the original power supply was replaced (the original one was too weak).


Above: The first IBM Personal Computer, the IBM 5150.

The first Apple computer

The first Apple personal computers (Apple I) were designed and hand-built by Steve Wozniak. The Apple I went on sale in 1976 for the price of $666.66. Only about 200 units were produced. The Apple I was basically just a motherboard with a processor, a total of 8KB of RAM, a display interface and some additional functionality. To have a working computer, the buyer would have to add a power supply, a keyboard and a display (and a case to keep mount it all in).


Above left: An Apple I computer. Above right: This was the Apple I, essentially a motherboard.

The first RAM

Arguably the first (writable) random access memory was Magnetic Core Memory (also called Ferrite-Core Memory) and was invented in 1951 as a result of work done by An Wang at Harvard University’s Computation Lab and Jay Forrester at MIT.
Core memory was a family of related technologies that used the magnetic properties of materials to give them a similar functionality to transistors. They stored their information using the polarity of tiny, magnetic ceramic rings with wires threaded through them. Unlike today’s RAM, core memory could keep its information even after the power was turned off.
Core memory was common until it was replaced by integrated silicon RAM chips in the 1970s. The “core” in core memory is why a memory dump is called a “core dump” even today.


Above left: Closeup of core memory. Above right: The core memory plane in the picture is 16×16 cm (6.3×6.3 inches), holding 128×128 bits (2048 byte).

The first hard disk drive

The IBM Model 350 Disk File was the first hard disk drive and was part of the IBM 305 RAMAC computer that IBM started delivering in 1956 (mainly intended for business accounting). It had 50 24-inch discs that together could store about 4.4 MB of data. The Model 350 spun at 1200 rpm, had a data transfer rate of 8,800 characters per second and an access time of approximately one second.


Above: The first hard disk drive, IBM Model 350.

The first laser printer

The laser printer was invented by Gary Starkweather at XEROX in 1969. His initial prototype was a modified laser copier where he had disabled the imaging system and introduced a spinning drum with eight mirrored sides. The first commercial implementation of a laser printer didn’t happen until IBM released the IBM model 3800 in 1976. It could pretty much fill up a room on its own.


Above: The IBM 3800, the first commercial laser printer.

The first web server

And since the Web is such an integral part of today’s computer experience, we couldn’t help but include another first: The first web server was a NeXT workstation that Tim Berners-Lee used when he invented the World Wide Web at CERN. The first web page was put online on August 6, 1991.
The computer had a note on it that said, “This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!” Understandable, considering that if you had shut it down in the early days you would have shut down the entire WWW. :P


Above: The web server that powered the first web pages on the WWW. Note the sticker with the warning to not turn it off.
It’s amazing how much has happened in the PC industry in just a few decades. Just imagine what things will be like 30-40 years from now…