Ever wondered where the birthplace of the world's top IT giants is? And what are the interesting facts about their origin? Today's technology giants are not originated from any luxurious and deluxe offices but small apartments, hostel rooms, garages and rented condos. Here are few examples:-
Apple
Apple Computer, Inc, is an American Multinational Corporation was born on 1 April, in the year 1976.The Apple company was established in Cupertino at California by Steve Wozniak, Ronald Wayne and Steve Jobs in order to sell Apple I personal computer. Steven Wozniak was a high school drop-out who also worked for Hewlett-Packard. His closest friend Steven Jobs, also a drop-out, worked for Atari and convinced him that the two should form a company to market the new computer.
They initiated the idea in a spare bedroom of steve jobs's parents which is kind of a small garage which served as everything from designing and manufacturing to shipping unit.
Multi-millionaire Mike Markkula provided essential business expertise and funding of 0,000 during the incorporation of Apple. The Apple II was introduced on April 16, 1977 at the first West Coast Computer Faire. In 1980 the Apple III was released.
CERN
CERN ("Centre Européen de Recherche Nucléaire") scientific research - located astride the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva-Switzerland is also known as the birth-place of the World Wide Web which was began as a CERN project called 'ENQUIRE'. It was aimed to share documents among researchers using web browsers in a multi-platform environment.
It was founded in 1954.The Father of Internet-Tim Berners-Lee, systems engineer Robert Cailliau and others brought together the concept of information system based on hypertext links.On May 1991, it was the first time that the information-sharing system using HTML, HTTP, and a client software program (www) was fully operational on the multiplatform computer network at the CERN laboratories in Switzerland.
eBay
On Sept 3, 1995 something like online garage sale now a leader in Internet Revenue-eBay was founded in Pierra Omidyar's San Jose, California living room. eBay has built an online person-to-person trading community on the Internet by the 28-year-old French born Iranian Computer Programmer. He had previously worked with Claris developing software for Apple Computers. This auction web was hosted on the same server as Pierre's page about the ebola virus. According to some accounts, he started the website to answer a question: what effect would equal access to information have on the marketplace? The very first item sold on eBay was a broken laser pointer for .83. The first name eBay used was Echo Bay Technology. Apparently, the company wanted to register for echobay.com domain name but because of its unavailability they shortened the name to eBay.com. Meg Whitman, Harvard Business School graduate joined eBay in 1998.
Facebook
In early 2004, 23-year-old Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook At third floor of Kirkland House room in Cambridge, Massachusetts while studying psychology at Harvard University. Later his friends and roommates Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskovitz joined him. On October 28, 2003 Zukerberg wrote Facemash to rate people's beauty and Coursematch, to view people taking their degree. The name "The Facebook" came from the sheets of paper distributed to students at the beginning of the year.
Facebook originally created and restricted for the Harvard students to keep in touch but because of its popularity the network was extended to other colleges and universities. In August 2005 it became "Facebook.com" after the url address was purchased for 0,000. Currently it has 250 million users world-wide.
Google
Larry Page and Sergey Brin together build world's no. 1 search engine and Internet Company, Google while they were PHD students at Stanford University. According to some accounts, they disagree about most everything during their initial meetings, but later in Jan.1996 they began the company as a research project. They set up workspace in Susan Wojcicki's garage at 232 Santa Margarita, Menlo Park and officially incorporated on September 4, 1998.. There are many stories of the origin of word 'google'. One of them is that, Sean suggested word "googleplex" and Larry recommended "googol". While registering for the domain name they misspelled the word and found http://www.google.com domain name available. They liked the name and finally registered for it.
They outgrow their garage office and move to new digs at 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto with just 8 employees. In January of 1996, Larry and Sergey had begun collaboration on a search engine called BackRub, named for its unique ability to analyze the "back links" pointing to a given website. In Jan 2004 the company launched orkut and stepped in the sphere of social networking.
Hewlett-Packard
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard graduated in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1935. Hewlett and Dave Packard hatched Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) in 1938. They started in an iconic garage which is located at 367 Addison Ave, California. The two laid the foundation of the today's largest personal computer manufacturer. Hewlett and Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett, Packard won the coin toss but named their electronics manufacturing enterprise the "Hewlett-Packard Company".
They started their work in a garage served as research and manufacturing lab for its early products. Bill Hewlett got to tinker in the garage and sleep in a shed where as Dave Packard and his wife, Lucile, lived in the ground-floor apartment. This place is widely known as birth place of Silicon Valley and the garage was listed on the national register of historic places. The company first successful product was a precision audio oscillator, the Model HP200A.
Yahoo
In January 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo, PHD candidates in Electrical Engineer graduate founded one of the leading internet communication companies, Yahoo. They created a website called "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web". In April 1994 it was renamed as 'Yahoo', The official acronym is "Yet another Hierarchical Officious Oracle". Yahoo! itself first resided on Yang's student workstation, "Akebono," while the software was lodged on Filo's computer, "Konishiki". The first URL for Yahoo was (akenbono.stanford.edu/yahoo) named after famous sumo wrestlers. Yahoo is headquartered in 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, California, (in Silicon Valley).
YouTube
Three friends Chad Hurley, 29, Steve Chen, 28 and Jawed Karim met each other during their time working for PayPal. Hurley grew up in Pennsylvania was a designer in PayPal, Chen was born and raised in Taipei, Taiwan till the age of 15 before his whole family moved to the United State. He was a programmer; Karim was born in Merseburg, East Germany to Bangladeshi father. He was responsible for a few key projects in PayPal. According to some accounts, one night they got irritated, whilst trying to email a video clip. It was then the idea of YouTube originated in the garage. Funny how all multimillion-dollar companies or in this case billion-dollar starts from the garage in Menlo Park, California. The interesting fact is that YouTube was first launched as a dating website. Where the users post video of them and take message from other users. Apparently Plan failed, and they revamped it to general video sharing website. On February 14, 2005 -YouTube domain name was registered and on April 23, 2005 "Me at the zoo" -19 seconds of Jawed Karim in front of the elephants at the San Diego Zoo, is the first video posted to the site. Nike is the first big company to embrace YouTube's promotional potential. On October 9, 2006 Google buys YouTube for .65 billion.
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