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Defunct computer hardware companies

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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
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Motorola, Inc. () was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois. It was founded by brothers Paul and Joseph Galvin in 1928 as Galvin Manufacturing Corporation and had been renamed Motorola since 1947. Many of Motorola's products had been radio-related communication equipment such as two-way radios, consumer walkie-talkies, cellular infrastructure, mobile phones, satellite communicators, pagers, as well as cable modems and semiconductors. After having lost $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009, Motorola was split into two independent public companies: Motorola
Sun Microsystems
defunct American computer hardware and software company
General Electric
American multinational conglomerate
ATI Technologies
Canadian technology corporation
Compaq
Compaq Computer Corporation was an American information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced some of the first IBM PC compatible computers, being the second company after Columbia Data Products to legally reverse engineer the BIOS of the IBM Personal Computer. It rose to become the largest supplier of PC systems during the 1990s. The company was initially based in Harris County, Texas.
Commodore International
former North American home computer and electronics manufacturer
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
Novell
Digital Equipment Corporation
American manufacturer of minicomputers
One Laptop per Child
non-profit initiative
Raytheon
Raytheon is a business unit of RTX Corporation and is a major U.S. defense contractor and industrial corporation with manufacturing concentrations in weapons and military and commercial electronics. Founded in 1922, it merged in 2020 with United Technologies Corporation to form Raytheon Technologies, which changed its name to RTX Corporation in July 2023.
RCA Corporation
defunct American electronics company
Silicon Graphics
former American company
Nortel
Nortel Networks Corporation, formerly Northern Telecom Limited, was a Canadian multinational telecommunications and data networking equipment manufacturer headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario. It was founded in Montreal, Quebec, in 1895 as the Northern Electric and Manufacturing Company, or simply Northern Electric. Until an antitrust settlement in 1949, Northern Electric was owned mostly by Bell Canada and the Western Electric Company of the Bell System, producing large volumes of telecommunications equipment based on licensed Western Electric designs.
Olivetti
Olivetti S.p.A. is an Italian manufacturer of computers, tablets, smartphones, printers and other such business products as calculators and fax machines. Headquartered in Ivrea, in the Metropolitan City of Turin, the company has been owned by TIM S.p.A. since 2003.
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.
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]]
Dell EMC
American technology company
Freescale Semiconductor
American company
Atmel
Atmel Corporation was a creator and manufacturer of semiconductors before being subsumed by Microchip Technology in 2016. Atmel was founded in 1984. The company focused on embedded systems built around microcontrollers. Its products included microcontrollers (8-bit AVR, 32-bit AVR, 32-bit ARM-based, automotive grade, and 8-bit Intel 8051 derivatives) radio-frequency (RF) devices including Wi-Fi, EEPROM, and flash memory devices, symmetric and asymmetric security chips, touch sensors and controllers, and application-specific products. Atmel supplies its devices as standard products, application
Juniper Networks
American multinational technology company
Palm, Inc.
1992–2010 American electronics company
Amstrad
Amstrad plc was a British consumer electronics company, founded in 1968 by Alan Sugar. During the 1980s, the company was known for its home computers beginning with the Amstrad CPC and later also the ZX Spectrum range after the Sinclair deal, which led it to have a substantial share of the home computer market in Britain. In the following decade it shifted focus towards communication technologies, and its main business during the 2000s was the manufacture of satellite television set-top boxes for Sky, which Amstrad had started in 1989 as the then sole supplier of the emerging Sky TV service.
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.
National Semiconductor
American company
Rockwell International
1973-2001 aerospace manufacturer
Fairchild Semiconductor
American company
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.
Sinclair Research
British consumer electronics company
Cyrix
Cyrix Corporation was a microprocessor developer that was founded in 1988 in Richardson, Texas, as a specialist supplier of floating point units for 286 and 386 microprocessors. The company was founded by Tom Brightman and Jerry Rogers. Jerry Rogers was also serving as the company Chief Executive Officer and president up until December 9, 1996, when he stepped down from this role, but remained on the Board of Directors.
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.
MOS Technology
semiconductor design and fabrication company
Vestel
Vestel is a Turkish home and professional appliances manufacturing company consisting of 18 companies specialised in electronics, major appliances and information technology. Vestel's headquarters and production plant are located in Manisa, while since 1994 the company's parent conglomerate is the Istanbul-based Zorlu Holding.
UNIVAC
UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) was a line of electronic digital stored-program computers starting with the products of the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation. After capturing the public imagination with the use of the UNIVAC I during the 1952 US Presidential election it was decided to extend the branding to all machines made by the other computing divisions of the Remington Rand company (Engineering Research Associates and the Norwalk Laboratory of Remington Rand).
Packard Bell
American multinational hardware and electronics corporation
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.
Fujitsu Siemens Computers
Japanese and German IT vendor
Remington Rand
American manufacturer
Acorn Computers
British computer company founded in 1978
Control Data Corporation
defunct supercomputer firm
English Electric
former aerospace and defence company
Computer Sciences Corporation
information technology company
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.
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.
Symbolics
thumb|100px|Symbolics 3600
Gateway
American multinational hardware and electronics corporation
Minolta
was a Japanese manufacturer of cameras, lenses, camera accessories, photocopiers, fax machines, and laser printers. Minolta Co., Ltd., which is also known simply as Minolta, was founded in Osaka, Japan, in 1928 as . It made the first integrated autofocus 35 mm SLR camera system. In 1931, the company adopted its final name, an acronym for "Mechanism, Instruments, Optics, and Lenses by Tashima".
Verbatim
American company producing memory media in the IT sector
Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems
American electronics company
Be Inc.
American company
Marconi Company
former company
Tandy Corporation
trading company
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.
S3 Graphics
American-based computer graphics company
VEB Robotron
East German manufacturer of computers and consumer electronics
Atari, Inc.
defunct American video game and home computer company (1972–1984)
Ad Lib, Inc.
company
PerkinElmer
PerkinElmer, Inc., previously styled Perkin-Elmer, is an American global corporation that was founded in 1937 and originally focused on precision optics. Over the years it went into and out of several different businesses via acquisitions and divestitures; these included defense products, semiconductors, computer systems, and others. By the 21st century, PerkinElmer was focused in the business areas of diagnostics, life science research, food, environmental and industrial testing. Its capabilities include detection, imaging, informatics, and service. It produced analytical instruments, genetic
Epyx
Epyx, Inc. was an American video game developer and publisher active in the late 1970s and 1980s. The company was founded in 1978 as Automated Simulations by Jim Connelley and Jon Freeman, publishing a series of tactical combat games. The Epyx brand was introduced when the company branched out to a series of more action-oriented titles. In 1983, as these types of games now represented the majority of their product line, the company was renamed to match. Epyx published a long series of games through the 1980s. The company's assets are currently owned by Bridgestone Multimedia Group Global.