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Standards, research and protocols

Not companies selling anything, or not only that: the laboratories, foundations and specifications the commercial entries are built on top of.

10 companies

1898 - presentBell Labs, Lucent & Alcatel - the transistor's bloodlineThe transistor, information theory, Unix, the laser, cellular - ten Nobel Prizes of foundations, spun into Lucent in 1996, merged with Alcatel in 2006, carried into Nokia in 2016.vendor

1906 - presentXerox - the company that fumbled the futureXerography built the empire; PARC invented Ethernet, the GUI, and laser printing - and networking's history runs through that lab.vendor

1948 - presentRAND Corporation - where packet switching was imaginedPaul Baran's 1964 'On Distributed Communications' argued a network with no center could survive anything - AT&T declined to build it; the internet did.

1971 - presentCYCLADES (IRIA, France)Where the datagram was born.

1982 - presentCompTIAIts entire value was being owned by nobody, and in 2024 it was bought.training

1983 - presentDNS & BIND - the internet's phone book and its reference implementationMockapetris's 1983 design and Berkeley's software that ran it - delegation, caching, and forty years of the same wire format.

1986 - presentNCSA - the campus lab that made the web visibleMosaic gave the web a face in 1993; NCSA httpd's orphaned patches became Apache; NCSA Telnet networked a generation of campuses.

1989 - presentHTTP & Gopher - the web's protocol and the rival it eclipsedTwo futures shipped in 1991; one spring of licensing decided between them - CERN gave the web away, Minnesota asked for money.

1995 - presentThe Apache Software FoundationThe web server that ran the web, built by eight people trading patches by email.vendor

1999 - presentFreeRADIUSAuthenticates about a third of the people on the internet, and has had the same project leader since 1999.vendor

All companies, in order