Silicon Valley

On September 4, 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin filed the paperwork to incorporate Google Inc., turning a Stanford PhD side project into a company. The two had met a few years earlier when Brin, already a grad student, gave campus tours to prospective students like Page. Their shared interest in extracting patterns from huge, messy datasets led them to a search engine they first called BackRub, built around the idea of ranking web pages by how many other pages linked to them.

By 1997 they’d renamed the project Google, a nod to “googol,” the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros — a fittingly oversized name for a company whose stated mission was to organize all of the world’s information. The incorporation in September 1998 made it official, and the fledgling company set up shop in a Menlo Park garage. It didn’t take long for the outside world to notice: by December of that same year, PC Magazine had already named Google one of its “Top 100 Web Sites” for 1998, a remarkably fast turnaround for a company barely three months old.

What started as two grad students’ research project became the dominant way most of the world finds information online, and eventually the anchor of Alphabet, one of the largest companies on the planet. It’s a reminder that some of tech’s biggest empires started as unglamorous, unfunded experiments in a university lab.

Also on this day: September 4 has a habit of showing up in tech history — in 1888, George Eastman registered the “Kodak” trademark and patented his roll-film camera, kicking off the era of consumer photography.

Source: EDN

Daily Tech History is a running series looking back at notable moments in technology on this date.

On September 2, 1936, Andrew Grove was born in Budapest, Hungary — a birth that, decades later, would matter enormously to the technology industry. Born Gróf András István, he survived Nazi occupation as a child and fled Hungary alone at age 20 during the 1956 revolution, arriving in the United States with almost nothing. Within a decade he’d become one of Silicon Valley’s most consequential executives.

Grove joined Intel on the day it was founded in 1968 as employee number three, working alongside legends Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore. He became CEO in 1987 and spent the next decade transforming Intel from a struggling memory-chip maker into the dominant force behind the personal computer’s processor. Under his leadership, Intel’s market value grew from roughly $4 billion to $197 billion. Grove’s management philosophy, distilled in his famous line “Only the paranoid survive,” pushed the idea that companies must constantly watch for “strategic inflection points” — moments of fundamental change that can make or break a business if leaders don’t act fast enough. He’s also credited with popularizing the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) goal-setting framework, which Intel used internally and which later became a cornerstone of how Google — and countless startups since — sets and tracks goals.

Also worth noting: Grove’s influence was recognized well beyond the chip industry. In 1997, Time magazine named him Person of the Year, crediting him as “the person most responsible for the amazing growth in the power and the innovative potential of microchips.” It’s a reminder that the hardware powering every device we use today has a very human history behind it.

Source: Wikipedia — Andrew Grove

Daily Tech History is a running series looking back at notable moments in technology on this date.

Daily Tech History: September 4, 1998 — Google Is Officially Incorporated

Daily Tech History: September 2, 1936 — Andrew Grove, the Man Who Built Intel, Is Born

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