pplpod

Intel was incorporated in Mountain View, California, in 1968 by chemist Gordon Moore and physicist Robert Noyce, two of the Traitorous Eight who had left Fairchild Semiconductor, with investor Arthur Rock. They passed on the name Moore Noyce, which sounded like more noise, chose Integrated Electronics, and bought the Intel trademark from a hotel chain. Their target was memory: in 1970 the 1103 DRA...

The Intel 4004 began in April 1969, when Japanese calculator maker Busicom asked Intel, then a small memory-chip startup, to build chips for a programmable desktop calculator to compete with the Olivetti Programma 101, which stored data as acoustic pulses in magnetostriction wire. Busicom's engineers wanted seven custom chips. Marcian Ted Hoff, Intel employee number 12, saw that Intel lacked the s...

Igor Sikorsky was born in Kiev in the Russian Empire, where he designed aircraft from the S-1 through the S-27 before the Russian Revolution drove him to the United States. On March 5, 1923 he founded the Sikorsky Aero Engineering Corporation near Roosevelt Field in New York. His projected S-28, a four-engine, 32-passenger biplane, never left the drawing board, so his first American aircraft was t...

Micron Technology started in Boise, Idaho, in 1978, founded by Ward Parkinson, Joe Parkinson, Dennis Wilson and Doug Pitman as a semiconductor design consultancy. In 1981 they decided to make chips themselves, building a plant called Fab One to produce 64K DRAM, the short-term working memory of a computer. Because a fab needs clean rooms, atomic-scale machinery and vibration-proof buildings, the m...

Hilton began in 1919 when Conrad Hilton bought the 40-room Mobley Hotel in Cisco, Texas, to house workers in the oil boom. He bought more Texas hotels, opened a Waco property in 1927 with air-conditioned public areas and cold running water, and in 1943 took over the Roosevelt and bought the Plaza in Manhattan, making Hilton the first hospitality company to span the contiguous U.S. The Roosevelt be...

Hasbro began in late 1923 in Providence, Rhode Island, when brothers Herman, Hillel and Henry Hassenfeld, Polish Jewish immigrants from Ulanów, founded Hassenfeld Brothers to sell textile remnants. They used the scraps to line pencil cases, and when their pencil supplier started competing with them, they began making pencils themselves. During World War II they rescued Jewish refugees from their h...

Hapag-Lloyd grew from two bitter German rivals: HAPAG, the Hamburg-America Line founded in Hamburg in 1847, and Norddeutscher Lloyd, founded in Bremen in 1857. HAPAG went for scale and luxury, starting the Imperator, Vaterland and Bismarck in 1912, the first liners above 50,000 gross register tons, a measure of enclosed volume rather than weight. NDL chased volume and speed, carrying about 218,000...

HMS Dreadnought, launched in 1906, made every other battleship obsolete. Pre-dreadnoughts carried mixed batteries, but as torpedoes pushed engagements out to 6,000 yards, gunners could not tell the splashes of heavy shells from those of the smaller guns. British observers including Captain William Pakenham saw in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and 1905 that 12-inch guns did the decisive damage at...

In the summer of 1971, cable executive Charles Dolan was aboard the Queen Elizabeth II on a family vacation, trying to save his money-losing company. Sterling Manhattan Cable was building the first urban underground cable system in the U.S., trenching wire past water mains, subway lines and gas pipes beneath New York. His idea, first called the Green Channel, was unedited Hollywood movies and live...

George Lucas founded Lucasfilm in December 1971 in Marin County, Northern California, deliberately far from the Los Angeles studio system. After THX 1138 and the 1973 hit American Graffiti, Universal rejected his space fantasy script, but 20th Century Fox took Star Wars. In 1977 he set up a subsidiary, the Star Wars Corporation, to hold the copyrights, sequel rights and merchandising rights, accep...

The company most recently known as WarnerMedia began far from Hollywood. In the 1960s Kinney National Services ran parking lots, office cleaning and funeral homes, a conglomerate built on countercyclical cash flow. Steve Ross used that money to buy the struggling Warner Bros.-Seven Arts studio in 1969, and by 1972 the company spun off its service businesses and renamed itself Warner Communications...

The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, Freddie Mac, was created by the Emergency Home Finance Act of 1970 to compete with Fannie Mae, which had been privatized in 1968 and was the only big buyer of mortgages. Freddie Mac does not lend to homebuyers. It buys loans from banks, bundles them into mortgage-backed securities for global investors and charges a guarantee fee to promise timely payment...

John C. Bogle's 1951 Princeton thesis found that mutual fund managers rarely beat market indexes over time and that fees ate any edge. He joined Wellington Management that year, became president in 1967 and CEO in 1970, but a 1966 merger with a Boston fund group went badly and he was fired in 1974, later calling his conduct inexcusable. He negotiated a separate administrative unit named Vanguard a...

Fidelity Investments is privately owned: parent FMR LLC is about 40 percent held by CEO Abigail Johnson and her family and 60 percent by current and former employees. In mid-2026 it had $7.8 trillion in assets under management and $19.9 trillion under administration, and 2025 revenue reached $37.7 billion with 80,000 employees and retirement plans for over 28,800 businesses. Founded in 1930 as the...

In 1955 physicist William Shockley founded Shockley Semiconductor in Mountain View, California, to build a hard-to-manufacture four-layer diode. His erratic management drove eight researchers, including Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and Jean Hoerni, to leave. Noyce pitched Sherman Fairchild of Fairchild Camera and Instrument on silicon over germanium, and in 1957 Fairchild Semiconductor was born in a...

Experian is an Irish multinational credit bureau and data broker based in Dublin and listed in the FTSE 100, with almost $8.5 billion in fiscal 2026 revenue and nearly 22,000 employees. It traces to Credit Data Corporation, bought in 1968 by aerospace and automotive firm TRW. In November 1996 TRW sold the unit to Bain Capital and Thomas H. Lee Partners, who sold it a month later to Great Universal...

Evergreen Marine Corporation was founded in Taiwan on September 1, 1968, by Chang Yung-fa with a single cargo ship, the Central Trust, offering a go-anywhere service. A second ship joined in 1969 for Middle East routes, and a U.S. office opened in 1974. The parent rebranded as Evergreen International SA in 1981, and in 1984 the company launched a round-the-world service in both directions. Acquisi...

Equifax began in Atlanta in 1899 as the Retail Credit Company, founded by brothers Cator and Guy Woolford to provide risk reports for insurers and employers. By the 1960s its local inspectors were interviewing landlords, grocers and employers and filing rumors about people's marriages, sex lives and politics, with negative findings rewarded. When the files were computerized around 1970, public out...

In 1994 Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen founded DreamWorks SKG, the first new major Hollywood studio since 1928. Their pact promised fewer than nine films a year, freedom to work elsewhere and being home for dinner. Each put in $33 million, Paul Allen added $500 million and Miky Lee of South Korea's CJ Group $300 million. Based on the Universal lot, they launched television w...

Celebration is a town in Osceola County, Florida, built by the Disney Development Company on roughly 4,900 acres at an estimated cost of $2.5 billion. CEO Michael Eisner saw it as a nod to Walt Disney's unbuilt vision of EPCOT as a real city, but planners Jaquelin T. Robertson and Robert A.M. Stern looked backward, using New Urbanism and New Classical architecture. Houses sat close to the street w...

Delbert Eugene Webb was born on May 17, 1899, in Fresno, California, to fruit farmer Ernest and Henrietta Webb. He dropped out of high school, worked as a carpenter and ship fitter, and married nurse Hazel Lenora Church in 1919. Typhoid fever at 28 sent him to Phoenix, where he formed the Del E. Webb Construction Company in 1928. In 1942 the federal government hired his firm to build the Poston Wa...

DHL began in 1969 with Larry Hillblom, a UC Berkeley law student who flew overnight between Oakland and Los Angeles as an insurance courier. He teamed with Adrian Dalsey and Robert Lynn, and their initials became the name. Their first big client was Seatrain Lines: DHL flew bills of lading from Honolulu to San Francisco in suitcases on commercial flights so cargo ships could unload on arrival. The...

DC Comics began in 1935 when Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson launched National Allied Publications and the magazine New Fun, betting on original stories rather than newspaper reprints. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster introduced Dr. Occult that year. Deep in debt to distributor Harry Donenfeld, the major formed a lopsided partnership to publish Detective Comics, the source of the DC initials, and Done...

The Soviet launch of Sputnik 1 in October 1957 led President Eisenhower to authorize the Advanced Research Projects Agency in February 1958, with $520 million and a place inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Its first director, Roy Johnson, left a $160,000 job at General Electric to take the post for $18,000. When NASA formed later in 1958, ARPA lost its civilian space work and most of i...

Cyrix was founded in Richardson, Texas, in 1988 by Jerry Rogers and Tom Brightman. It started with math coprocessors such as the FasMath 83D87, which used hardware multipliers instead of Intel's CORDIC algorithm and ran faster on less power. Its 486SLC and 486DLC chips ran 486 instructions while fitting older 386 motherboards. With about 300 employees and no factory of its own, Cyrix contracted pr...