pplpod

TurboTax began in 1984 as a product of Michael A. Chipman's ChipSoft and was sold to Intuit in 1993, where it outpaced H&R Block's software and TaxAct. Its reach showed in 2009, when Treasury nominee Timothy Geithner told the Senate he had used TurboTax on returns that left him owing over $42,000 in self-employment taxes from his International Monetary Fund years, and Intuit answered that the...

Texas Instruments began in 1930 as Geophysical Service Incorporated, which set off dynamite and read seismic reflections to help oil companies find deposits. In World War II it applied the same signal processing to submarine detection gear for the U.S. Navy. It reorganized as Texas Instruments in 1951 after finding General Instruments taken, paid Western Electric $25,000 in 1952 for a transistor p...

In 1986 Taiwan's government recruited industry veteran Morris Chang, then in his mid-50s, to build a domestic chip industry. Chang proposed a pure-play foundry that would manufacture chips for other companies and design none of its own. Texas Instruments and Intel turned him down, but Philips took a 27.6% stake for $58 million, transferred technology and supplied first CEO James E. Dykes, while th...

In June 1959 the Del E. Webb Development Company paid over $20 million for 20,000 acres of the Marinette and Santa Fe ranches from the J.G. Boswell Company, on the site of the former ghost town of Marinette. A nationwide naming contest, with a new house as the prize, replaced the working name Marinette Retirement Community with Sun City. On opening weekend, January 1, 1960, about 100,000 people ca...

Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison founded Stripe in Palo Alto in 2010, when accepting payments online meant weeks of merchant accounts, payment gateways and card security work. Stripe let developers take payments by adding a few lines of code, selling to engineers instead of chief financial officers. In 2011 it raised $2 million from backers including Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz and PayPal...

Stephen M. Ross started in 1972 with a $10,000 loan from his mother, founding Related Housing Companies to build subsidized low and moderate income apartments. Working with federal tax credits, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, state finance agencies and local zoning boards taught him how to combine public policy and private capital. In 1998 Related announced the $1.7 billion Time W...

In November 1956, Hungarian rebels drove a captured Soviet T-54A into the courtyard of the British embassy in Budapest, and military attache Lieutenant Colonel Noel Cowley measured its armor and gun. His data showed the West's 20-pounder gun could not defeat the T-54's front, making the U.S. M48 obsolete, while the replacement T95, with its X-shaped vapor cycle engine, kept breaking down. The XM60...

In the late 13th century the kingdom of Singapura sat on the north bank of the Singapore River, the only port in the southern Strait of Malacca. Chinese trader Wang Dayuan's 1349 account lists exports of raw cotton, laka wood and hornbill casques, and a 1984 excavation at Fort Canning Hill led by John Miksic uncovered 14th-century porcelain and glassware. The rise of the Malacca Sultanate sideline...

William Shockley earned his undergraduate degree at Caltech and a physics PhD at MIT in 1936, then joined Bell Labs, where in 1947 he co-created the first solid-state transistor with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. Bell Labs put Bardeen and Brattain ahead of him on the patent and kept passing him over for promotion because of his abrasive management. After a 1953 sabbatical at Caltech, he won fu...

Atlantic City began as a summer retreat for the Lenape before Dr. Jonathan Pitney promoted the barrier island in the 1850s as a health resort, at a time when doctors believed in miasma theory and prescribed sea air. With Samuel Richards he built the Camden and Atlantic Railroad from Philadelphia, and when trains arrived in 1854 the 600-room United States Hotel spread across 14 acres. In 1870 hotel...

Samsung Electric Industries was formed in Suwon in 1969 under a group that once traded fertilizer and sweeteners, and it had no basic technology of its own. It learned to build black and white TVs, calculators and refrigerators through joint ventures with Sanyo and NEC, and public anger over the Japanese partnerships forced a promise to export everything those ventures made. In 1974 it bought the...

The Student Loan Marketing Association was created by the U.S. government in 1972 as a government-sponsored enterprise that bought student loans from local banks so they could keep lending. Albert Lord joined in 1981, became CEO in 1995 and led the push out of the federal charter, a process that began in 1997 and ended when Congress terminated the charter at the end of 2004. Along the way SLM Corp...

SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, holds no money and settles no payments: it is a secure messaging network that tells banks where funds should move. It grew out of the Nixon shock of 1971, when floating exchange rates made slow, manually typed Telex messages costly, and out of fears that First National Citibank's proprietary system would become the default. In...

Hyundai founder Chung Ju-yung created Hyundai Electronics in 1983, expecting cars to become computers on wheels. It first tried SRAM, which needs four to six transistors per bit, and its yields were poor. A 1985 switch to DRAM using designs imported from Vitelic also failed in mass production, so Hyundai worked as a contract foundry for Texas Instruments and General Instruments, learned clean-room...

Mattel's name joins Harold "Matt" Matson and Elliot Handler and leaves out Ruth Handler, who ran the business. The three started Mattel Creations in a Los Angeles garage in January 1945 making picture frames from Lucite and scrap wood, and Ruth turned the scraps into dollhouse furniture that soon outsold the frames. When Matson's health failed in 1946, the Handlers bought his share and Ruth took c...

Rupert Murdoch inherited a controlling interest in The News, an Adelaide afternoon tabloid, in 1952 after the death of his father, Keith Murdoch, and used News Limited from 1954 to build a chain of Australian papers. In the 1960s he moved into Britain with The Sun and the News of the World. In 1986 and 1987 he broke the print unions, the National Graphical Association and SOGAT, by secretly buildi...

The Port of Rotterdam covers 105 square kilometers and was the world's busiest port by cargo tonnage from 1962 to 2004, before Singapore and Shanghai passed it. It handles over 428 million tons and 14.2 million TEUs a year for a hinterland of more than 500 million consumers. In the 19th century, as river routes to the North Sea silted up, engineer Pieter Caland proposed the Nieuwe Waterweg, a cana...

Vladimir Tenev and Baiju Bhatt, Stanford classmates who had built high-frequency trading platforms in New York, founded Robinhood in 2013 with $3 million in seed funding and launched zero-commission trading in 2015, when brokers charged $5 to $10 a trade. Early investors included Snoop Dogg, Jared Leto and Nas, and options and crypto followed in 2017 and 2018. Revenue came from payment for order f...

Zelle began as a defensive alliance. Facing PayPal and Venmo in the early 2010s, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo launched a joint service in 2011 called clearXchange, and Capital One and U.S. Bank joined by 2015. In 2016 Early Warning Services, owned by banks including PNC and BB&T, acquired the platform, and in June 2017 it was renamed Zelle. Unlike wallet apps that hold funds...

Nik Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko founded Revolut in London in July 2015 around a prepaid card for spending abroad in 90 currencies at the interbank rate. Instead of routing payments through SWIFT correspondent banks, it settled transactions from its own currency pools and absorbed the cost to win customers. By 2016 it had 300,000 users and nearly £1 billion in transactions. Revolut Business followe...

Raytheon, founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1922 as the American Appliance Company by Vannevar Bush, Lawrence K. Marshall and Charles G. Smith, spent the Cold War living two lives. After building magnetrons and proximity fuses in World War II, it entered guided missiles in 1948, and in 1950 its Lark became the first missile to intercept and destroy a flying target using semi-active radar hom...

In 1901 railroads were the core technology of American commerce, and two Western rivals both lacked a direct route into Chicago. James J. Hill controlled the Great Northern Railway and E.H. Harriman controlled the Union Pacific. The prize was the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, which already had track, rights of way and terminal access in Chicago. Backed by J.P. Morgan, Hill's side paid $...

TransUnion was formed in 1968 as a holding company for the Union Tank Car Company, a Standard Oil descendant that leased rail tank cars for oil and chemicals. In 1969 it bought the Credit Bureau of Cook County in Illinois, with about 3.6 million credit accounts, and that side venture became the core business. The Marmon Group acquired TransUnion in 1981 for around $688 million, Goldman Sachs Capit...

Intuit, founded in 1983 in Mountain View, California, by Scott Cook and Tom Proulx, already sold Quicken when it released QuickBooks in 1992 for small business owners with no accounting training. The DOS version was built on Quicken's code, while the Windows and Mac versions came from an acquired product called In-House Accountant. Professional accountants objected that it skipped double-entry boo...

Irwin Jacobs and six co-founders from defense contractor Linkabit started Qualcomm in San Diego in July 1985 as a contract research center. Its first big commercial product, OmniTRACS in 1988, gave trucking fleets such as Schneider National two-way satellite messaging and tracking, and that money funded research into CDMA. The CTIA had backed the rival TDMA standard in 1989, but Qualcomm's three 1...