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Defunct computer companies based in California

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Hewlett-Packard thumbnail
Hewlett-Packard
The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company. It was founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939 in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California. Growing to become an influential high-tech powerhouse at the heart of Silicon Valley, the company was known for its progressive business philosophy, deemed the HP Way. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components, as well as software and related services, to consumers, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), and fairly large companies
Sun Microsystems thumbnail
Sun Microsystems
defunct American computer hardware and software company
NeXT thumbnail
NeXT
thumb|In the early 1990s, NeXT sold this complete NeXTstation. NeXT, Inc. (later NeXT Computer, Inc. and NeXT Software, Inc.) was an American technology company headquartered in Redwood City, California, which specialized in computer workstations for higher education and business markets, and later developed the first dynamic web page software. It was founded in 1985 by Steve Jobs, the Apple Computer co-founder who had been removed from Apple that year. NeXT debuted with the NeXT Computer in 1988, and released the NeXTcube and smaller NeXTstation in 1990. The series had relatively limited sale
Silicon Graphics
former American company
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Convair
thumb|right|Convair F-106 Delta Dart thumb|right|Convair 880 thumb|right|RIM-2 Terrier antiaircraft missile on board USS Providence thumb|right|Atlas rocket launching Friendship 7, the first U.S. crewed orbital space flight thumb|right|Atlas-Centaur with [[Pioneer 10 on launch pad]]
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Xilinx
Xilinx, Inc. ( ) was an American technology and semiconductor company that primarily supplied programmable logic devices. The company is renowned for inventing the first commercially viable field-programmable gate array (FPGA). It also pioneered the first fabless manufacturing model.
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3dfx Interactive
3dfx Interactive, Inc. was an American computer hardware company headquartered in San Jose, California, founded in 1994, that specialized in the manufacturing of 3D graphics processing units, and later, video cards. It was a pioneer in the field from the mid 1990s to 2000.
Palm, Inc.
1992–2010 American electronics company
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Juniper Networks
American multinational technology company
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Fairchild Semiconductor
American company
Rockwell International
1973-2001 aerospace manufacturer
National Semiconductor
American company
3Com thumbnail
3Com
3Com Corporation was an American digital electronics manufacturer best known for its computer network products. The company was co-founded in 1979 by Robert Metcalfe, Howard Charney and others. Bill Krause joined as President in 1981. Metcalfe explained the name 3Com was a contraction of "Computer Communication Compatibility", with its focus on Ethernet technology that he had co-invented, which enabled the networking of computers.
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Maxtor
Maxtor Corporation was an American computer hard disk drive manufacturer. Founded in 1982, it was the third largest hard disk drive manufacturer in the world before being purchased by Seagate in 2006. It was revived as a brand in 2016.
Packard Bell
American multinational hardware and electronics corporation
Zip2
Zip2 Corp. was a company that provided and licensed online city guide software to newspapers. The company was founded in Palo Alto, California, as Global Link Information Network, Inc. on November 9, 1995, by Greg Kouri and brothers Elon and Kimbal Musk. Initially, Global Link provided local businesses with an Internet presence, but later began to assist newspapers in designing online city guides before being purchased by Compaq Computer in 1999.
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NexGen
NexGen, Inc. was a private semiconductor company based in Milpitas, California, that designed x86 microprocessors until it was purchased by AMD on January 16, 1996. NexGen was a fabless design house that designed its chips but relied on other companies for production. NexGen's chips were produced by IBM's Microelectronics division in Burlington, Vermont, alongside PowerPC and DRAM parts.
Digital Research
software company
Computer Sciences Corporation
information technology company
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Magnavox
Magnavox (often stylized as MAGNAVOX; from Latin magna vox ) is an American electronics brand that was founded in 1917. It was purchased by North American Philips in 1974, which was absorbed into Dutch electronics company Philips in 1987. The predecessor to Magnavox was founded in 1911 by Edwin Pridham and Peter L. Jensen, co-inventors of the moving-coil loudspeaker at their lab in Napa, California, under United States Patent number 1,105,924 for telephone receivers. Six decades later, Magnavox produced the Odyssey, the world's first home video game console.
Transmeta Corporation thumbnail
Transmeta Corporation
Transmeta Corporation was an American fabless semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California. It developed low power x86 compatible microprocessors based on a VLIW core and a software layer called Code Morphing Software.
LenovoEMC thumbnail
LenovoEMC
Iomega Corporation (later LenovoEMC) was a company that produced external, portable, and networked data storage products. Established in the 1980s in Roy, Utah, United States, Iomega sold more than 410 million digital storage drives and disks, including the Zip drive floppy disk system. Formerly a public company, it was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2008, and then by Lenovo, which rebranded the product line as LenovoEMC, until discontinuation in 2018.
Be Inc.
American company
Atari, Inc.
defunct American video game and home computer company (1972–1984)
S3 Graphics
American-based computer graphics company
OCZ thumbnail
OCZ
OCZ was a brand of Toshiba that was used for some of its solid-state drives (SSDs) before they were rebranded with Toshiba. OCZ Storage Solutions was a manufacturer of SSDs based in San Jose, California, USA and was the new company formed after the sale of OCZ Technology Groups SSD assets to Toshiba Corporation. Since entering the memory market as OCZ Technology in 2002, the company has targeted its products primarily at the computer hardware enthusiast market, producing performance DDR SDRAM, video cards, USB drives, power supply units, and various cooling products.
Cypress Semiconductor
company
Signetics
Signetics Corporation was an American electronics manufacturer specifically established in Silicon Valley to make integrated circuits. Founded in 1961, they went on to develop a number of early microprocessors and support chips, as well as the widely used 555 timer chip. The company was bought by Philips in 1975 and incorporated in Philips Semiconductors (now NXP).
LSI Corporation
semiconductors and software designer
Adaptec thumbnail
Adaptec
Maxim Integrated
American company that designs, manufactures, and sells analog and mixed-signal integrated circuits
eMachines
eMachines was a brand of economical personal computers. In 2004, it was acquired by Gateway, Inc., which was in turn acquired by Acer Inc. in 2007. The eMachines brand was discontinued in 2013.
Atari, Inc.
American subsidiary and publishing arm of Atari SA
Litton Industries
defense contractor in the United States
TRW Inc.
American corporation involved in mainly aerospace, electronics, automotive, and credit reporting, etc.
HGST thumbnail
HGST
thumb|right|upright=1.1|HGST's Fujisawa plant, expanded from IBM Fujisawa#Fujisawa manufacturing|IBM's Fujisawa plant HGST, Inc. (Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) was a manufacturer of hard disk drives, solid-state drives, and external storage products and services.
Siebel Systems
On-premises customer relationship management software application company acquired by Oracle
Exidy
Exidy, Inc. was an American developer and manufacturer of coin-operated electro-mechanical and video games which operated from 1973 to 1999. They manufactured many notable titles including Death Race (1976), Circus (1978), Star Fire (1978), Venture (1981), Mouse Trap (1981), Crossbow (1983), and Chiller (1986). They were also the creators of the Exidy Sorcerer (1978) home computer platform.
Atari Corporation
computer and video game console manufacturer
Storage Technology Corporation thumbnail
Storage Technology Corporation
Storage Technology Corporation (StorageTek or STK, earlier STC) was a data storage technology company headquartered in Louisville, Colorado. New products include data retention systems, which it calls "information lifecycle management" (ILM).
Cinemaware
Cinemaware was a video game developer and publisher. It had released several titles in the 1980s based on various film themes. The company was resurrected in 2000, before being acquired by eGames in 2005.
Tandem Computers
American computer hardware manufacturer ( 1974–1997)
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Mad Catz
video game accessories company
E-mu Systems thumbnail
E-mu Systems
company
Ageia thumbnail
Ageia
Ageia, founded in 2002, was a fabless semiconductor company. In 2004, Ageia acquired NovodeX, the company who created PhysX – a Physics Processing Unit chip capable of performing game physics calculations much faster than general purpose CPUs; they also licensed out the PhysX SDK (formerly NovodeX SDK), a large physics middleware library for game production.
Rise Technology
company
Essential Products thumbnail
Essential Products
American technology company
Silicon Image thumbnail
Silicon Image
Semiconductor Manufacturing Company
Spansion thumbnail
Spansion
Spansion Inc. was an American-based company that designed, developed, and manufactured flash memory, microcontrollers, mixed-signal and analog products, and system-on-chip (SoC) solutions. The company had more than 3,700 employees in 2014 and was headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. It was founded as the joint-venture FASL between AMD and Fujitsu, which eventually was spun out into the independent company Spansion afterwards.
Pinnacle Systems
company
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OQO
OQO was a U.S. computer hardware company that was notable for manufacture of handheld computers. Its systems possessed the functionality of a tablet PC in a size slightly larger than a personal digital assistant (PDA). According to Guinness World Records, the "OQO" was the smallest full-powered, full-featured personal computer in 2005. The company's first version of subnotebook computer was the OQO model 01. It had been compared with the Ultra Mobile PC platform, although it was introduced before the UMPC took flight. The company was founded in 2000.
Conexant thumbnail
Conexant
Conexant Systems, Inc. was an American-based software developer and fabless semiconductor company that developed technology for voice and audio processing, imaging and modems. The company began as a division of Rockwell International, before being spun off as a public company. Conexant itself then spun off several business units, creating independent public companies which included Skyworks Solutions and Mindspeed Technologies.
Qualcomm Atheros thumbnail
Qualcomm Atheros
thumb|Other logo of Atheros Atheros Communications, Inc. was an American computer networking company independently active from 1998 to 2011. It produced semiconductor chips for network communications, particularly wireless chipsets. The company was founded under the name T-Span Systems in 1998 by experts in signal processing and VLSI design from Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, and private industry. The company was renamed Atheros Communications in 2000 and it completed an initial public offering in February 2004, trading on the NASDAQ under the symbol ATHR.
Amdahl Corporation
American mainframe computer manufacturer
Leap Motion
American manufacturer of computer hardware sensor devices
Conner Peripherals
defunct American computer hardware company
Redback Networks thumbnail
Redback Networks
company
Actel
Actel Corporation was an American manufacturer of nonvolatile, low-power field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), mixed-signal FPGAs, and programmable logic solutions. It had its headquarters in Mountain View, California, with offices worldwide. In November 2010, Microsemi acquired Actel for $430 million. In May 2018, Microchip Technology acquired Microsemi.
Memorex
Memorex Corp. began as a computer tape producer and expanded to become both a consumer media supplier and a major IBM plug compatible peripheral supplier. It was broken up and ceased to exist after 1996 other than as a consumer electronics brand specializing in disk recordable media for CD and DVD drives, flash memory, computer accessories and other electronics.
Hercules Computer Technology
American computer peripheral manufacturer