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Part VII – Industry & Economy

The founders, companies and business models that turned computing into an industry: IBM, Microsoft and Apple, Intel and Nvidia, Amazon and Google, but also Olivetti, SAP, Nokia and Sega. Separate articles follow the markets themselves, from the spreadsheet and the ATM to venture capital, the dot-com bubble and software as a service.

Founders & Builders

  • Sandra Kurtzig — $2,000 and a second bedroom in 1972, MANMAN on the HP 3000, the first woman to take a technology company she founded public (1981), and the Ingres purchase that ended ASK
  • Lore Harp McGovern and Vector Graphic — an Altair memory board sold from a Westlake Village bedroom in 1976, the Vector 1, an IPO in October 1981, and the CP/M decision that sank it
  • Gary Kildall and the OS IBM Didn’t Take — CP/M, the missed meeting, and the accident that gave the OS market to Microsoft
  • Phil Katz and the Zip Format — won the ARC war, gave the zip spec away, wrote DEFLATE, dead in a hotel room at 37
  • Dan Bricklin and VisiCalc — the Harvard student who shipped the world’s first electronic spreadsheet in 1979
  • Pardo and Landau: LANPAR and the Spreadsheet Patent — forward referencing for Bell Canada’s budgets in 1969, a patent won pro se after Benson, and the Refac suit lost over one affiant’s hidden eight weeks at Lanpar
  • Paul Allen and Microsoft — spotted the Altair on the Popular Electronics cover, co-founded Microsoft
  • Bill Gates and Microsoft — the DOS deal, Windows, and the antitrust case
  • Satya Nadella and Microsoft — the 2014 CEO succession and the cloud-first turnaround of a company written off as past its peak
  • Virginia Rometty — the first woman to run IBM, 22 quarters of falling revenue, the Watson Health moon shot, the ProPublica age-discrimination report, and the $34B Red Hat deal
  • Steve Jobs and Apple — Reed and Atari, the Macintosh and the ouster, NeXT, Pixar, the return, iPod, iPhone, iPad, the failures, the cancer
  • Steve Wozniak: The Engineer’s Apple — the hardware genius behind the Apple I and II
  • Tim Cook and Apple — the supply-chain revolution, the 2011 succession nobody envied, the $3 trillion company, the FBI fight, and the canceled Apple Car
  • Mike Markkula: The Adult Supervision — the retired Intel millionaire who funded the garage, wrote the business plan, and owned a third of Apple
  • Susan Kare and the Macintosh Icons — the Happy Mac, the trash can, the ⌘ symbol, and the visual grammar of the GUI
  • Larry Tesler and the War on Modes — modeless editing, cut/copy/paste from PARC’s Gypsy (1974–75), the NO MODES license plate, and the Law of Conservation of Complexity
  • Bill Atkinson and HyperCard — QuickDraw, MacPaint, and the hypermedia system that shipped free with every Mac and previewed the web, minus the network
  • Jony Ive and Apple Design — iMac G3 to iPhone, design as strategy, the butterfly-keyboard dead end, and the $6.5B OpenAI second act
  • Hartmut Esslinger — frog design, the Snow White language from the Apple IIc (1984) to the Macintosh II, a $2 million-a-year fee, and the NeXT cube after following Jobs out of Apple
  • Tony Fadell: From iPod to Nest — General Magic’s lesson, the father of the iPod, and Google’s $3.2B smart-home bet
  • Bill Campbell: The Trillion Dollar Coach — the football coach who mentored Jobs, Page, Brin, and Bezos simultaneously
  • Jack Tramiel and Commodore — Holocaust survivor, “computers for the masses, not the classes,” and the best-selling Commodore 64
  • Chuck Peddle — the $25 MOS 6502, the KIM-1, the Commodore PET, and the Sirius 1/Victor 9000
  • Clive Sinclair — the slimline calculator, the ZX81 and Spectrum, the QL, and the C5 that took the vehicle company down in ten months
  • David Potter — the Imperial physicist who funded Psion from a duvet maker’s shares, shipped the first volume handheld computer in 1984, and whose EPOC became Symbian
  • Rod Canion and Ben Rosen — the House of Pies placemat, $111 million in year one, the Deskpro 386 that beat IBM, the Gang of Nine, and the chairman who fired the founder in October 1991
  • Michael Dell — the dorm-room PC upgrader who removed the dealer, the youngest Fortune 500 CEO at 27, the Intel-rebate settlement, the Icahn fight, and the $67B EMC deal
  • Larry Ellison and Oracle — read Edgar Codd’s paper more carefully than IBM did
  • Jeff Bezos and Amazon — from online bookstore to AWS, Kindle, and global retail infrastructure
  • Larry Page and Sergey Brin — PageRank, BackRub, and the world’s most profitable advertising machine
  • Google: The Company — PageRank to AdWords to YouTube to Android to Alphabet
  • Sundar Pichai and Google — from Chennai to Chrome to CEO of Alphabet, the AI-first turn, the ChatGPT code red, and the 2024 antitrust verdict
  • Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook — TheFacebook, News Feed, Cambridge Analytica, Meta, and the $45B metaverse bet
  • Reed Hastings and Netflix — DVDs by mail (1997), the streaming pivot (2007), and the original-content bet that redefined television
  • Jensen Huang and Nvidia — the Denny’s founding, near-bankruptcy of 1996, CUDA, and the H100-era explosion
  • Jack Ma and Alibaba — Taobao defeating eBay by going free, Alipay, and the 2020 speech that brought the regulators
  • Ren Zhengfei and Huawei — rural China strategy, world’s largest telecom equipment maker, and the Mate 60 Pro
  • Masayoshi Son and SoftBank — the six-minute Alibaba bet, the iPhone in Japan, ARM, the $100B Vision Fund, and WeWork
  • Eric Yuan — nine visa applications, WebEx, the mobile video product Cisco refused in 2011, and Zoom: 10 million to 300 million daily participants in four months of 2020 while Skype watched
  • Aaron Swartz — RSS at 13, Creative Commons, JSTOR affair, SOPA campaign, and death at 26
  • Marc Benioff and Salesforce — “No Software” and the SaaS revolution
  • Andy Bechtolsheim and Sun — SUN workstation designer and the man who wrote the first Google check
  • Bill Joy: The Other Sun Founder — BSD Unix, vi, TCP/IP, Sun, and “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us”
  • Mitchell Baker and Mozilla — built Mozilla from Netscape’s code, launched Firefox, kept the open web institutionally alive
  • Tim O’Reilly — the animal books, the web’s first commercial site and first banner ad, and the man who named “open source” and “Web 2.0” into existence
  • Jack Dorsey, Twitter, and Square — first tweet, fired and returned, Square’s card reader that banked the unbanked
  • Peter Thiel and the PayPal Mafia — PayPal, first Facebook investor, Palantir, and Zero to One
  • Paul Graham and Y Combinator — Viaweb in Lisp, the essays from “Beating the Averages” to “Founder Mode”, the batch model that funded Reddit, Airbnb and Stripe, and Arc
  • Elon Musk and Software-Defined Industry — Tesla OTA updates, SpaceX reusability, and software integration as industrial strategy

Markets & Business Models

  • The Dot-com Bubble — Netscape, Pets.com, and the Nasdaq crash of 2000
  • Venture Capital and Silicon Valley — Arthur Rock, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, a16z, and which technologies survived
  • The Search Engine Wars — from Archie and AltaVista to Google PageRank and AdWords
  • The E-Commerce Revolution — Bezos, eBay, PayPal, and the end of brick-and-mortar retail
  • Barcodes and the UPC — a Morse-code idea drawn in beach sand became the UPC, the invisible infrastructure of retail, logistics, and the QR code
  • ERMA and the Bank Computer — Bank of America’s check crisis, SRI’s account numbers and magnetic ink, and the 25-ton machine that took General Electric into computers
  • The ATM — Ostertag’s 1965 patent, Barclays and Uppsala 1967, Goodfellow’s PIN, Tübingen 1968, Nixdorf’s DES-checked PIN, and Diebold Nixdorf
  • The Rise of the Tech Giants — how Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft came to control digital infrastructure: network effects, kill zones, TikTok’s interest graph, the cloud oligopoly, Nvidia and the AI compute moat, and the 2024–2026 antitrust verdicts that stopped short of breakups
  • The Spreadsheet Revolution — from LANPAR and VisiCalc through Lotus, the look-and-feel lawsuits and Excel to Google Sheets and LAMBDA
  • The Typewriter and the Keyboard — writing pianos, Sholes and Remington, QWERTY, type wheels and golf balls, Nietzsche and Kafka, speed typing, a cipher typewriter, and machines for Chinese
  • The History of Word Processing — IBM’s $10,000 tape typewriter, Redactron and Wang, Electric Pencil and WordStar, Word from 1983 to Copilot, macro viruses, Clippit and the .docx fight, Japan’s 2.71 million kanji machines, and Google Docs
  • The Lotus 1-2-3 Story — $53M in year one, then the OS/2 bet that let Excel take everything
  • Shareware and Public Domain: Software Distribution Before the Internet — Fluegelman, Knopf, and Wallace’s honor-system economics, Fred Fish’s 1,120 Amiga disks, and the Apogee model that launched Doom
  • Crowdfunding and Kickstarter — all-or-nothing from 2009, Double Fine, Pebble and Oculus in 2012, “Kickstarter is not a store”, the Coolest Cooler’s 20,000 empty-handed backers, and a 9 percent failure rate
  • The Rise of SaaS — Salesforce, the subscription model, and the end of software as capital purchase
  • From MRP to ERP: Software for the Factory — Orlicky’s parts explosion, the APICS MRP Crusade, MANMAN and MAPICS on minicomputers, Gartner’s 1990 label, FoxMeyer’s bankruptcy, Baan’s books, and Infor collecting the survivors
  • The Gig Economy and Technology — Uber, Airbnb, algorithmic management, and who pays the costs
  • High-Frequency Trading — FPGA order matching, the Flash Crash of 2010, and the co-location arms race
  • CeBIT and the Age of the Computer Trade Fair — Hannover’s 830,000-visitor giant, COMDEX and the Adelson fortune, and why the computer trade fair died
  • Code Red: When Incumbents Panic — Operation Crush, Project Chess, the Tidal Wave and Halloween memos, Trustworthy Computing, the peanut-butter manifesto, Lockdown, the burning platform, Google’s code yellow and code red, OpenAI’s code red, and why most alarms failed

Companies

  • IBM: The Company — Watson’s THINK to the $5B System/360 bet to the 1993 near-death to Red Hat: computing’s only second-century company
  • DEHOMAG: IBM’s German Subsidiary — Heidinger’s Hollerith licensee, the D11 tabulator, the 1933 and 1939 censuses, the Black controversy, and the SS prisoner registration
  • Hewlett-Packard — the $538 garage partnership that founded Silicon Valley’s culture, then spent it: HP Way to ink annuity to the 2015 split
  • Compaq and the BIOS Clean-Room — the placemat startup that legally cloned IBM’s BIOS, beat IBM to the 386, reached the Fortune 500 faster than anyone, fired its founder, lost to Dell, and was absorbed by HP
  • Joseph C. Wilson and Haloid — a Rochester photo-paper maker living on Kodak’s raw materials bets thirteen years and $75 million on xerography, leases the 914 by the copy, and sponsors the UN on television against the John Birch Society
  • Triple-I: Information International — Fredkin’s film-reader company: LISP 2, the FR-80 recorder, Westworld to TRON, the first electronically paginated newspaper (1982), and absorption by Autologic and Agfa
  • Camillo and Adriano Olivetti — Italy’s typewriter dynasty, the factory as social utopia, the transistorized Elea 9003, and the 1964 GE sale as Europe’s great what-if
  • Pier Giorgio Perotto — the Olivetti engineer whose Programma 101 was too small to be sold with the computer division, and which sat on a desk in 1965 for $3,200: 44,000 sold, NASA, and HP’s $900,000 in royalties
  • Adobe: The Creative Software Empire — Illustrator, Photoshop, Acrobat, the Creative Cloud subscription gamble, and the $20B Figma deal regulators killed
  • Cisco: The Company That Routed the Internet — a Stanford couple’s router, the investor who ousted them, and the company that was briefly the world’s most valuable
  • SAP — five IBM engineers, R/3, the ERP category, HANA, and the painful shift to the cloud
  • Sony — transistor radio, Walkman, Trinitron, the CD, PlayStation, and a habit of losing format wars
  • Samsung — from dried fish to the world’s largest memory-chip and smartphone maker
  • Nokia — from paper mill to 40% of the world’s phones, then collapse in five years
  • Motorola — the car radio, Apollo’s voice, the 68000, the first cell phone, and Iridium
  • Nintendo: A Century of Play — from 1889 hanafuda cards to the Switch; Yokoi’s “withered technology,” Miyamoto, and winning by skipping the specs race
  • Qualcomm: The Invisible Tax on Every Phone — CDMA, Snapdragon, the patent-royalty “Qualcomm tax,” and the wars with Apple, the FTC, and a $117B takeover
  • Sega — “Genesis does what Nintendon’t,” Sonic, and the console war it lost
  • ByteDance and TikTok — the recommendation engine that reorganized attention
  • Tencent — QQ, WeChat’s super-app, the world’s largest gaming company, and Beijing’s crackdown