Vendor lineage
Electronic Data Systems (EDS)
Invented the idea that a company could hand its computing to somebody else entirely.
Ross Perot founded Electronic Data Systems in 1962 in Dallas, on a proposition that barely existed as a market: that organisations would rather pay someone else to run their data processing than run it themselves. Every managed service and every outsourcing contract since descends from that bet.
EDS built systems that became invisible infrastructure, including the networks that let bank machines accept and dispense money. Its business was never the hardware; it was operating the thing on somebody else's behalf, under contract, at a price agreed in advance.
General Motors bought EDS in 1984 and spun it back out in 1996. Hewlett-Packard acquired it in 2008 for nearly $14B and folded it into HP Enterprise Services.
It belongs on this timeline because the services model it created is the one every vendor on the rest of this page now sells alongside their products - and because an instructor-led training business is itself a descendant of the same idea, that expertise can be contracted rather than hired.