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Companies that make the product. Most of this timeline is here, because most of the industry's stories are about somebody building a thing and then discovering what it was for.

114 companies

1847 - presentSiemens - the 1847 telegraph startupWerner von Siemens built the Indo-European telegraph line; the conglomerate's communications bloodline runs through EWSD, the Nokia JV, and Unify.services
1865 - presentNokia - from paper mill to network giantA 160-year arc: rubber boots to world phone leader to one of the three companies that build the world's mobile networks.
1875 - presentToshiba - the company that gave the world flashFujio Masuoka invented NOR and then NAND flash at Toshiba in the 1980s - every SSD, phone, and memory card descends from it; the T1100 started the laptop era.
1876 - presentEricsson - 150 years of telephonyFrom an 1876 Stockholm telegraph workshop to the AXE switch, GSM, Bluetooth, and today's 5G triumvirate.
1886 - presentUnisys - computing's oldest bloodlinesBurroughs (1886) plus Sperry's UNIVAC - the ENIAC creators' company - merged in 1986: the deepest lineage in this section, still running ClearPath descendants today.services
1887 - presentGetronicsA Dutch electrical firm from the 1880s that ended up owning what was left of Wang Laboratories.services
1895 - presentNortel & Bay Networks - the giant that vanishedFrom 1895 Montreal to a third of Canada's stock index to the largest bankruptcy in Canadian history - and the $4.5B patent auction that ended it.
1897 - presentMarconi - wireless itself, then the bubbleGuglielmo Marconi bridged the Atlantic in 1901; a century later the company bearing his name became telecom's starkest dot-com cautionary tale, carved up by Ericsson in 2006.carrier
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.standards
1899 - presentNEC - Japan's first joint ventureFounded 1899 with Western Electric capital; NEAX switched the world's calls, the PC-98 owned Japan's PC market, and the C&C vision named the convergence everyone now lives in.services
1906 - presentHoneywellA thermostat company that became a mainframe company and then went back to controlling physical things.
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.standards
1910 - presentHitachi - the industrial giant that stores the worldFrom a mine's five-horsepower motor in 1910 to VSP arrays, HGST drives, and Britain's express trains - the conglomerate whose storage lineage runs through every SAN.services
1911 - presentIBM - the century companyPunched cards to System/360 to the PC to Red Hat: the company the rest of the industry defined itself against.services
1928 - presentMotorola - the radio centuryCar radios to the walkie-talkie to the first handheld cell call and the moon itself; split in 2011 into Solutions and a Mobility arm that passed through Google to Lenovo.
1931 - presentBull - Europe's computing championPunch-card wars against IBM in the 1930s, the prophetic Gamma 60, nationalization and privatization - and a final act building Europe's first exascale supercomputer.services
1935 - presentFujitsu - Japan's computing standard-bearerBorn from a 1935 Fuji Electric spin-off (itself a Furukawa-Siemens venture), Fujitsu fought IBM with Amdahl, absorbed ICL, and built the K and Fugaku supercomputers.services
1939 - presentHPE Networking - HP, 3Com, Aruba, JuniperThe great consolidation: from the Addison Avenue garage to the $14B Juniper merger.
1948 - presentFluke - the meters and certifiers in every field bagThe 87 multimeter and the DSX CableAnalyzer - and a 2015 three-way split (Fortive, NetScout, NetAlly) worth knowing cold.
1951 - 1999Wang Laboratories - the office before the PCAn Wang's core-memory patents funded a word-processing empire that owned the office of the late 1970s - and the PC unmade it inside a decade.
1957 - presentDigital Equipment Corporation - the minicomputer kingKen Olsen's PDP and VAX machines defined two decades of computing; DEC co-authored Ethernet and ended inside Compaq in 1998.
1965 - presentCyclades, Avocent & Vertiv - the physical layer of uptimeA Brazilian-founded console-server pioneer, the KVM leaders, and Liebert's computer-room weather - consolidated into the company whose product is uptime itself.
1968 - 1999Data General - the soul of a new machineEdson de Castro left DEC to build the Nova; Tracy Kidder's Pulitzer immortalized the Eagle; CLARiiON storage carried the DNA into EMC in 1999.
1968 - presentIntel & AMD - Fairchild's children: the x86 rivalryThe 4004, Moore's Law, and the second source that wrote AMD64 - one entry, because neither story parses without the other.
1972 - presentSAP - five engineers against the mainframeEx-IBM founders built the ERP category in 1972; R/3 conquered the client-server world and HANA reinvented the core.
1974 - 1997Tandem Computers - the machine that never stopsJimmy Treybig's NonStop architecture made fault tolerance a product in 1976; it still runs stock exchanges and card networks today, as HPE NonStop.
1975 - presentMicrosoftThe platform company: Windows, Azure, and Microsoft 365.
1976 - presentHCLTechStarted because IBM left India, and forty-one years later bought IBM's software.services · training
1976 - presentAppleLost the first round of the personal computer market badly, and won every round after it.
1977 - 1993Tandy and RadioShackOutsold Apple three to one with a worse computer, because it had seven thousand shops.reseller
1977 - presentOracle - the database empireThe first commercial SQL database, four decades of acquisitions - Sun included - and 2025's handover to co-CEOs for the AI era.
1979 - 2016EMC CorporationMade storage a category of its own, then became the largest technology acquisition in history.
1979 - present3Com - Ethernet leaves the labBob Metcalfe commercialized his own PARC invention; EtherLink wired the PC era, Palm rode along, and the story ended at HP in 2010.
1982 - 1995Lotus DevelopmentForecast a million dollars in its first year, made fifty-three, and shipped software still running four decades later.
1982 - presentSymantecThe security brand of a generation, now Broadcom's enterprise line.
1982 - 2010Sun Microsystems - the network is the computerFour Stanford-orbit founders, SPARC, Solaris, Java - the dot in dot-com, absorbed by Oracle in 2010.
1982 - presentSilicon Graphics - the geometry of HollywoodJim Clark's geometry engines rendered Jurassic Park and invented OpenGL; the name ended at HPE in 2016.
1982 - 2002Compaq - the clone that became the kingThree ex-TI engineers sketched a portable on a placemat, clean-roomed the IBM BIOS, and built the fastest company to a billion dollars - then bought DEC and merged into HP.
1983 - 2013Cabletron Systems and EnterasysSold cable assemblies out of a garage, grew into Cisco's most serious rival, then dismantled itself on purpose.
1983 - presentNovell - the network operating systemNetWare owned the LAN era and IPX ran the world's offices; the lineage ended at OpenText in 2023.
1983 - presentBanyan Systems - the directory pioneerVINES and StreetTalk delivered a true global directory service years before NDS or Active Directory - and lost anyway; the idea won everywhere.
1984 - presentCisco SystemsDid not invent the router, but was the first to sell one that spoke everybody's protocol at once.
1984 - presentThe Sniffer lineage - Network General to NetScoutThe 1986 Sniffer made protocol analysis a profession; through Dolch luggables, Network Associates, and Arbor's DDoS telemetry, the whole bloodline converged on NetScout.
1984 - presentDell & Force10 - the direct model and its fabricA dorm-room assembler became the datacenter's broadest supplier - and the 10GbE pioneer it absorbed in 2011 became its switching lineage.
1985 - presentSophosStarted in Oxford the year before the first PC virus spread, and is still here under its own name.
1985 - presentZTE - China's other giantShenzhen 1985, top-four in 5G - and the 2018 denial order that made supply-chain dependency the industry's most vivid lesson.
1986 - presentMadge Networks - Token Ring's standard-bearerFrom a Buckinghamshire farm to beating IBM in court at IBM's own game - and down with the protocol it championed: 'the Betamax of the networking world.'
1987 - presentFireEye, McAfee and IxiaThree companies that shared a distribution portfolio and almost nothing else.
1987 - presentMcAfee, FireEye & Mandiant - the road to TrellixThree security pioneers, one private-equity remix: Trellix and Skyhigh under STG, Mandiant inside Google Cloud, McAfee consumer private.
1987 - presentHuawei - the Shenzhen ascentFrom a 1987 PBX reseller to the world's largest telecom equipment maker - and the center of the decade's biggest technology-policy storm.
1987 - presentDolch (Kontron / Azonix lineage)The rugged luggable the Sniffer lived in.
1987 - presentThe access & home fleet - Netgear, TP-Link, Zyxel, Asus & Askey, Allied TelesisThe boxes everyone actually owns: the first hop of most packets on Earth, told as one fleet.
1987 - presentAllied TelesisJapan's global Ethernet workhorse, from media converters up.
1988 - presentZyxelThe modem-era first-mover from Hsinchu.
1989 - presentASUS + AskeyThe motherboard empire and its network-communications arm.
1990 - presentGenesysTwo sons of Soviet emigres met at a card game and decided the phone call and the customer record should arrive together.
1992 - presentNetAppNamed itself after exactly what it sold, which turned out to be most of the strategy.
1992 - presentCiena - the company that taught fiber to carry colorsThe first commercial DWDM deployment (Sprint, 1996) multiplied installed fiber sixteenfold - and Ciena has compounded the optical layer ever since, Nortel inheritance included.
1993 - presentCheck Point Software TechnologiesPatented stateful inspection, invented the firewall market, and then watched its own alumni build the competition.
1993 - presentNvidia - the GPU company that runs the fabricCUDA's decade-early bet, the AlexNet ignition, Mellanox - the network's biggest customer became one of its vendors.
1994 - presentRed HatEnterprise open source: RHEL, OpenShift, Ansible.
1994 - presentNetscape - the company that opened the webClark and Andreessen's Navigator took the internet mainstream; SSL, JavaScript, and the cookie were invented here - the browser lost the war, the inventions won everything.
1995 - 2013AltaVistaBuilt to stress-test a processor, it became the best search engine on the web - and was then turned into a portal.
1995 - presentThe Apache Software FoundationThe web server that ran the web, built by eight people trading patches by email.standards
1995 - presentBrocade & Foundry - the Broadcom diasporaTwo 1990s pioneers, one 2017 dismemberment: SAN to Broadcom, data center to Extreme, campus and Wi-Fi to CommScope.
1996 - 2001SixDegrees.comThe first social network, and it failed because not enough people were online yet.
1996 - presentF5Named after a tornado, and spent thirty years moving up the stack from ports to applications.
1996 - presentExtreme NetworksGrew mostly by buying the enterprise businesses that larger companies had stopped wanting.
1996 - presentNetScreen and Juniper NetworksOne firewall company whose alumni went on to found or shape most of the others.
1996 - 2006Riverstone NetworksSpun out of Cabletron to chase the metro Ethernet boom, and ran out of road when the boom stopped.
1996 - presentMikroTik - Latvia's quiet giantRouterOS on commodity hardware: the company that made carrier-grade routing affordable everywhere - and stayed independent.
1996 - presentBlue Coat & Packeteer - the checkpoint companiesCacheFlow's pivot made the proxy a security platform; PacketShaper created traffic shaping - together, the prehistory of the SSE category.
1996 - presentWatchGuard - the red box that made the firewall an applianceThe 1996 Firebox turned security from a project into an object - and the mid-market has run on it since.
1996 - presentNETGEARThe company that put networking on the retail shelf.
1996 - presentTP-LinkThe volume king of consumer networking.
1997 - presentKasperskyWorld-class malware research and a geopolitical problem, in the same company, both real.
1997 - presentPaesslerPRTG: the network monitoring standard of the mid-market.
1997 - presentRadware - the Zisapel lineageBorn of Israel's RAD Group in 1997; the ADC and DDoS specialist that rescued Alteon from Nortel's wreckage for ~$18M.
1998 - presentGoogleRanked pages by who linked to them rather than how often they said the word - and was nearly sold to AltaVista for a million dollars.
1998 - presentAkamai TechnologiesAnswered a question Tim Berners-Lee posed about congestion, and the answer became most of how the web is delivered.services
1998 - presentDatacom - Brazil's networking manufacturerThe hometown entry: carrier gear, GPON, and a national OS, designed and built in Rio Grande do Sul since 1998.
1999 - presentFreeRADIUSAuthenticates about a third of the people on the internet, and has had the same project leader since 1999.standards
1999 - presentQualysDelivered security scanning as a service in 2000, before anybody had a word for that.
1999 - presentSolarWindsSold the software that watches everything, which is exactly why somebody wanted it.
1999 - presentCyberArkPrivileged access and identity security.
2000 - 2010ArcSightDecided in advance what mattered, which is the opposite of what its main rival decided.
2000 - presentRapid7Bought the industry's best-known attack toolkit, which is the opposite of what its main competitor did with open source.
2000 - presentFortinetFounded by the man who had already built one firewall company, on the same argument taken further.
2000 - 2007IronPort SystemsWorked out that the useful question about an email was not what it contained but who sent it.
2000 - presentAvayaEnterprise communications: Aura, IP Office, and contact center.
2000 - presentA10 & Kemp - the ADC challengersThe second tier that kept the load-balancing leaders honest: A10 from the throughput flank, Kemp from below.
2002 - presentTenableBuilt on a scanner a seventeen-year-old wrote, and then closed the source to fund the company.
2002 - presentPing IdentityBet early that identity would have to work between organisations, not just inside one.
2002 - presentRiverbedWAN optimization pioneer turned observability company.
2002 - presentImperva - from WebCohort to ThalesThe WAF pioneer founded by a Check Point co-founder, now the application-security arm of a French defense giant.
2003 - 2024SplunkNamed after caving, because that is what searching your own logs felt like.
2004 - presentArista NetworksCloud-scale data-center and campus networking (EOS).
2005 - presentPalo Alto NetworksFounded by a Check Point alumnus on the argument that port numbers had stopped meaning anything.
2005 - presentUbiquiti - enterprise features at prosumer pricesairMAX armed the WISPs, UniFi made the controller model a $200 purchase - and two incidents every security reader should know cold.
2006 - presentAmazon Web ServicesThe cloud platform that defined the category.data centre · services
2007 - presentZscalerArgued that if users are not in the office, the security stack should not be either.
2007 - 2020MobileIronMobile device management pioneer, now part of Ivanti.
2009 - presentNutanixHybrid multicloud and hyper-converged infrastructure.
2009 - presentCloudflareBegan as a project asking where spam came from, and became infrastructure after users asked it to stop the spam instead.services
2011 - presentCrowdStrikeBuilt on the argument that you should hunt the attacker rather than the malware - then proved, in one morning, what a lightweight agent everywhere really means.
2012 - presentElasticChanged its licence to stop a cloud provider, got forked, and changed it back three years later.
2012 - presentNetskopeStarted from the observation that nobody knew which cloud applications their own staff were using.
2012 - presentVersa Networks - the SASE independentTwo ex-Riverstone, ex-Juniper brothers building unified SASE - one of the last large independents in a consolidated market.
2013 - presentNozomi NetworksBuilt on the constraint that you cannot scan an industrial network without risking the plant.
2013 - presentIllumioAssumed the attacker is already inside, and made the whole product about what happens next.
2014 - 2020Pulse SecureA company created to hold a product line older than itself.
2015 - presentOpenAIFounded as a non-profit hedge against AI being controlled by one company, and now largely owned by one company.
2017 - presentIvantiA 2017 company assembled from forty years of other people's software, and the place two vendors on this site came to rest.
2021 - presentAnthropicFounded by people who left OpenAI over where it was going, and built around the bet that safety research and frontier capability have to happen in the same building.

All companies, in order