Computing

Google

Google is a search engine company founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Its core technology, PageRank, ranked websites by inbound links — a method co-published with Motwani and Winograd and patented by Stanford. Scott Hassan wrote the first implementation. The company launched from Susan Wojcicki’s garage. Its name misspelled 'googol' to signal scale. Initial funding came from Andy Bechtolsheim’s $100,000 cheque in August 1998. The sources say nothing about advertising, revenue, users, infrastructure costs, or market position beyond this.

Tata Consultancy Services

Marc Andreessen

Adobe Inc.

Adobe’s founding story is not about creative tools—it is about control of a foundational layer: the language that told printers what to print. That decision, made in a garage in 1982, let Adobe license across hardware and software ecosystems before ever selling to end users. Everything else came later—and is absent from the verified record.

Bill Gates

IBM

IBM under Thomas J. Watson Sr. was a sales-and-leasing enterprise built on punched card tabulators — not computing. Its dominance relied on vertical control, not technical novelty. That control was dismantled by antitrust action in 1936. Everything else — System/360, AI, PCs — belongs to a later era.

Oracle Corporation

Oracle Corporation is a multinational technology company founded in 1977 in Santa Clara, California, by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates. It sells database software (especially Oracle Database), enterprise applications (ERP, HCM, CX, SCM), and cloud infrastructure and hardware. By the mid-2000s, it had become the world's largest enterprise software vendor. Its foundational database design drew from Edgar F. Codd’s relational model paper. IBM’s delay in releasing a relational database for Unix and Windows allowed Oracle to dominate mid-range and microcomputer systems. Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010 after regulatory approval in the U.S. and EU.

SAP

SAP is the world's largest vendor of enterprise software. Founded in 1972 in Walldorf by Dietmar Hopp and four former IBM colleagues, it built its first product—the RF financial accounting system—in 1973 for Imperial Chemical Industries in Östringen. Its technical distinction was real-time operation via local electronic storage and a common logical database, eliminating overnight punch card processing. It restructured from GbR to GmbH (1981), to AG (late 1980s), to SE (2014). Hopp led SAP from 1988 to 2005 and retained ~10% equity.

Steve Jobs

Thomas J. Watson Jr.

Xerox

Xerox pioneered the photocopier market starting with the Xerox 914 in 1959; Joseph C. Wilson signed an agreement in 1946 to develop Chester Carlson's invention commercially; before the 914, Xerox tested the market with the Flat-plate 1385 prototype, which proved nonviable due to slow speed; the 914—the first plain paper photocopier—was developed by Carlson and John H. Dessauer; researchers at Xerox and PARC invented key personal computing elements including the GUI, mouse, and desktop computing; Xerox opened PARC in 1970; and Gary Starkweather invented the laser printer in 1969 by modifying a Xerox 7000 copier.

Intel

Intel is a foundational semiconductor company whose business model pivoted from memory to microprocessors—and whose lasting leverage came from controlling the x86 instruction set, not just fabrication.

Microsoft

Microsoft’s founding was not about building the best software first — it was about controlling the terms of distribution before the market existed. Its early success came from timing, contractual foresight, and treating software as licensable intellectual property — not a service or craft. The company established the template for platform leverage in computing: own the interface, not the hardware.