Half a century after its founding in Albuquerque, New Mexico on April 4, 1975, Microsoft $MSFT (MSFT) consistently ranks as one of the world’s most valuable companies. Currently sitting on a $2.7 trillion market cap, the software company, now based in Redmond, Washington, has turned into an artificial intelligence leader.
The company, co-founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, has outlived several of its peers and competitors over the decades — but it’s not the only one to do so.
Here are four other tech companies that came about around the same time and are still here today.
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Cloud technology company Oracle $ORCL was founded in Santa Clara, California in 1977 by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates. The engineers initially called it Software Development Laboratories. It was renamed Relational Software Inc. before becoming Oracle (ORCL) Corporation in 1982.
Ellison currently serves as the company’s chairman and chief technology officer. Oracle moved its headquarters to Austin, Texas in 2020, and is now planning to move to Nashville, Tennessee.
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Apple $AAPL (AAPL) was founded as Apple Computer Company on April 1, 1976 in Los Altos, California. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who were college dropouts, founded the company in partnership with electronics industry executive Ronald Wayne. The Apple I personal computer was released the same year.
Wozniak and Jobs both left the company in 1985, but Jobs returned in 1997 to serve as interim chief executive. He permanently took on the role from 2000 until 2011, when he resigned due to his pancreatic cancer.
The company officially became “Apple” in 2007 after expanding from computers into other products, such as the iPhone.
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Computer hardware giant Advanced Micro Devices (AMD $AMD) was founded by Jerry Sanders and some of his Fairchild Semiconductor colleagues on May 1, 1969. The company, which focused on logic chips at the start, was initially headquartered in Sunnyvale, California before moving to Santa Clara. Today, the company has a market cap of $166 billion.
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Intel $INTC was founded on July 18, 1968 by Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore, the engineer whose prediction that the number of transistors on a microchip will double every two years became known as Moore’s law. Noyce and Moore were later joined by Andy Grove, who went on to serve as the company’s chief executive from 1987 to 1998.
