Most of the giants that dictate the way tech-at-large rolls these days had modest start-offs in the time of their early days. Some associated the prosperity of the companies or their creators to great foresight, knowing the “right” persons, and in many cases, being in the ideal place at the ideal time.
Actually, many of these creators “understood” a few things early on: they knew they were going to start their own company one day, they knew what they were performing was willing to be huge one day, they were driven (absolutely nothing was going to stop them) and they beat a bunch of risks many of us wouldn’t be easy taking these days.
Many of the main people from these organizations are appreciating the spoils of their hardwork at that time, today, and are definitely sustaining, investing and mentoring many modern-day startups. Let’s have a look at the classic pics of these founding titans, collected from the Internet and have a look into how it was for them the moment they were starting out as nobodies.
Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs with an Apple I, 1976. Wozniak built the Apple I (which was essentially a circuit board) by hand. Jobs helped sell the concept and eventually it proceeded sale in July 1976 for $666.66 per article. Apple I was substituted by Apple II a little over a year later. (Image Source: Computer History Museum).
Apple II Team, Stevens Creek 1978. A picture of the Apple II team at their modest Stevens Creek office space. Jobs is seen explaining with Michael Scott (2nd from the right), the first leader of the corporation, an usual occurrence. The team is flanked by the Apple II pcs on racks in the background. (Image Source: Business Insider).
Apple HQ in Cupertino, 1981. The rainbow Apple logo design was created in 1977 and used up until August 1999, right before it was switched out with more modernized monochromatic solutions. We notice here the initial logo displayed proudly in front of the Apple’s Cupertino office space, back in 1981. Michael Scott the first CEO of Apple in February 1981 fired 40 employees suddenly, and as a repercussion he was substituted by Mike Markkula (who employed him), before stopping in July the same year. (Image Source: TheHistory of Apple).
Microsoft co-founders, 1975. In 1975, Bill Gates had quit of Harvard to start Micro-Soft (the hyphen was fortunately gone down a year later) with Paul Allen who was working with MITS. They wrote software for MITS-owned Altair microcomputers but by late 1976 Microsoft has removed itself from MITS to write software for some other systems. In spite of their contrasts in their after years, the two recreated this old photo last year. (Image Source: Microsoft).
First 11 Microsoft members, 1978. The initial 11 members of Microsoft Corporation featuring Bill Gates at the bottom left side and Paul Allen at the bottom right side, just before the team transferred from Albuquerque to Seattle. (Image Source: Lumq).
Ceos of Adobe Systems, 1982. Academics Charles Geschke and John Warnock performed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the past 70’s before establishing Adobe. Their goal and incentive was to specifically transpose words and pictures onscreen to a printed page. They would will probably develop the PostScript technology. (Image Source: Hyperbate).
Intel ceos and its very first hire, 1978. Andy Grove, Intel‘s initial employ (left) and the co-founders, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore (both of two-faced 8 fame) along with a layout of the 8080 microprocessor in 1978. Grove had heard that both were leaving Fairchild Semiconductor (where the 3 of them performed) and just chose to follow. Intel would eventually moved from the memory chip business to microprocessors et cetera is history. (Image Source: NPR).
IBM chairman and ceo with an IBM 360 computer, circa 1970. IBM had really helped NASA put men on the moon and in 1971, CEO Thomas Watson Jr. (left) quit from his post, finishing a half-century long’s value of Watson family management. Thomas Vincent Learson retires as ceo 2 yrs later and is substituted by Frank T. Cary. (Image Source: Haverford).
IBM 7090 computer, 1961. The IBM 7090 (also named IBM 709-T) was a data processor computer system that was easily sold at $2.9 million per system (inflate that by 10 for these days’s prices). It was much faster than its precursor, and relatively cheaper. The IBM 7094 was operated during the Apollo moon landing in 1969. (Image Source: Wikipedia).
HP CEOS, 1963. Here’s a picture of founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard who usually visited their production level. Hewlett-Packard began by working with a wide variety of electronics and only concentrated more on computing hardware in the 1960’s. (Image Source: Computer History Museum).
Google co-founders, California 1999. Larry Page’s parents were both computer science mentors at Michigan State University and so it was not a surprise that he would certainly follow in their tracks in earning a PhD in Computer technology. Side by side with Sergey Brin, a fellow PhD student, they worked with “BackRub”, a research program to “count and quality each back link in the Web”. The picture shows the duo at Menlo Park exactly where they established their first office space, before they moved out to Palo Alto in early 1999. (Image Source: CNN Money).
The original Google platform, 1998. Here is where Google started– unassuming, lowkey– within the confines of Stanford University. Brin and Page had established the PageRank algorithm to bring importance to a page based on backlink data. This ultimately became the fundamentals of their online search engine. In 1998, Google was developed. (Image Source: Pingdom).
Yahoo! founding fathers, circa 1994. “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”, was really far from an experiment to change the world. “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” was essentially a web directory, rather than an online search engine. But it gained worldwide popularity quick and soon almost everyone was using Yahoo! as a launching page to the Internet. In 2008, Microsoft offered to purchase Yahoo for $44.6 billion, an offer that was declined. These days, Yahoo has a stock market value of $34 billion and is set to benefit from Alibaba’s pending IPO. (Image Source: TheRichest).
Facebook co-founders, 2004. Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes & Mark Zuckerberg were Harvard University roommates who made Facebook in their dorm room. The site originally created for Harvard university students eventually was available to anyone in September 26, 2006. Since September 2012, Facebook is reported to have 1 billion active users. Moskovitz has since left Facebook to co-found Asana when Hughes is current publisher and Editor-in-Chief of The New Republic. (Image Source: CNET).
YouTube Founders, 2005. Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, were initial staff members of PayPal before showing up and producing the very most popular video-sharing website on the Web, YouTube.com. The very first ever YouTube video, Me at the Zoo, was posted by Jawed Karim on April 23, 2005. By July the following year, the site was getting 100 million page views daily. 4 months later on, Google obtained Youtube at the sum of $1.65 billion. (Image Source: TheRichest).
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