The beginnings of today’s IT giants

January 5th, 2007

In every field there is bound to be two or more companies whose rivalry has lead to the evolution of the field where they “fight” their advertising battles. I took the liberty of analyzing the early beginnings of projects that became huge international companies, and made their founders very rich people. I grouped these projects by their fields of activity, and each field has two main competitors. So here we go:

Computers

The first name that pops to mind has got to be Microsoft, whether you like it or not. Microsoft is famous mainly for its operating system and its Bill. Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. The term Microsoft was first used by Gates in a leter to Allen, in 1975. A year later this became a registered trademark. Two years later the company developed a branch in Japan. 1980 marked the year that Microsoft released its first operating system, based on unix and called Xenix. This became home to the very first version of Microsoft Word (or Multi-Tool Word, as it was first named). The company got its real success with the release of DOS, in 1981.

Apple, Microsoft’s main competitor nowadays, was founded in 1976, by the two Steves: Jobs and Wozniak. Steve Wozniak actually began as an electronics hacker, but in 1975 he worked in Hewlett Packard, and designed games for Atari. In 1976, Steve Wozniak created what was to become the Apple I, and in that same year, on the first of April, Apple Computer was born. But the company founders got out of the ‘hobby’ zone with the release of the Apple II, which became the first personal computer to come in a plastic case and have color graphics. From then on, Apple began to develop into the huge company it is now.

Browsers

I’m not going to talk here about Internet Explorer. Everybody knows its history, and it almost monopolized the Internet until a few years ago. Instead, I’m going to speak about the other two most used browsers out there, Mozilla’,s Firefox and Opera.

Opera was born in 1994 in Norway, at Telenor. By 1995 it became an independent company named Opera Software ASA. The Opera browser, called until its 2.0 version “MultiTorg Opera”, became known for its multiple document interface (or MDI, similar to tabs nowadays), and its “hotlist” (sidebar). It was also the first browser to focus on achieving the W3C standards. In 1996, Opera was available on Windows platforms, as shareware, and at the end of 1997 it was released for multiple other operating systems.

Mozilla’s Firefox was created as an experimental branch of the Mozilla project. Firefox 1.0 was released in November of 2004, by its creators, Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross. Firefox (or Pheonix or Firebird, as it was previously called), gained notoriety thanks the ease with which it could be personalized, with the help of extentions and themes. Just two years after its release, Firefox held 29.9% of the total browser usage.

Yahoo! vs Google

That’s the category that would best fit when we’re talking about the rivalry between these two companies, simply because it extends to an enormous number of areas, from e-mail clients to mapping programs.

Yahoo! appeared in 1994, when Jerry Yang and David Filo created “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web”. In April of the same year the website changed its name to Yahoo! (which means “rude, unsophisticated”). Yahoo! (it was named so because “Yahoo” was already trademarked) became a Web portal and, in March of 1997 it acquired Four11. Its webmail service, Rocketmail, was to become Yahoo! Mail. As time passed, Yahoo! kept growing (and still is growing) into a worldwide company.

Google was created later than Yahoo!. In January 1996 Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford University graduates, created a search engine called BackRub (named so for its ability to analyze the “back links” pointing to a given website). One year later BackRub had gained some notoriety, and by 1998 Google Inc. was created (the word Google derives from “googol”, which is the number one followed by one hundred zeros). On September 21, 1999, the beta label came off the website, and from then on Google kept expanding.

This is how some of the greatest companies in the world got started. Instead of a conclusion, here are some of their first logos: