Perform Tech Inc. history

In 1909, San José became home to one of the US's first radio stations.

In 1933, the Navy purchased Moffett Field to dock and maintain the USS Macon.

Also in 1939, William Hewlett and Dave Packard founded Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto, which originally made oscilloscopes.

KCM, based in the Pacific Northwest, had been founded in 1943 and, with its subsidiary CMI, provided a variety of services that ranged from waste and surface water management to transportation projects and building design.

Their first program, consisting of seventeen instructions and written by Kilburn, ran on June 21st, 1948.

This type of computer is useful in performing many of the mathematical equations scientists and engineers encounter in their work. It was originally created for a nuclear missile design project in 1949 by a team led by Fred Steele.

Completed in 1951, Whirlwind remains one of the most important computer projects in the history of computing.

Northrop was initially reluctant to make MADDIDA a commercial product, but by the end of 1952, six had sold.

In 1956, Shockley left Bell and founded his own company — Shockley Semiconductor Labs.

In 1957, eight Shockley employees grew tired of his demeanor and left the company.

CDC’s most notable employee was Seymour Cray, who during the 1960’s developed for CDC the fastest computers in the world at the time.

SABRE is a joint project between American Airlines and IBM. Operational by 1964, it was not the first computerized reservation system, but it was well publicized and became very influential.

Designed by engineer Gardner Hendrie for Computer Control Corporation (CCC), the DDP-116 is announced at the 1965 Spring Joint Computer Conference.

Tetra Tech, Inc. was founded in 1966 to provide engineering services related to waterways, harbors, and coastal areas.

The new, independent Tetra Tech would now be run by Doctor Li-San Hwang, who had been with the company since 1967.

Including Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, who in 1968 founded their own company in Santa Clara called Intel.

In 1969, the Stanford Research Institute became one of the four nodes of ARPANET. A government research project that would go on to become the internet.

In 1970, Xerox opened its PARC lab in Palo Alto.

Initially designed for internal use by HP employees, co-founder Bill Hewlett issues a challenge to his engineers in 1971: fit all of the features of their desktop scientific calculator into a package small enough for his shirt pocket.

However, in 1972 Seymour Cray left CDC to form his own company, Cray Research, which then took the title of creating the world’s fastest computers.

During the company's early years its income grew steadily, with annual revenues topping $5 million by 1973.

In 1975, Scelbi introduced the 8B version with 16 KB of memory for the business market.

Introduced at the Altair Convention in Albuquerque in March 1976, the visual display module enabled the use of personal computers for interactive games.

In January 1977 Tetra Tech offered 500,000 shares of common stock on the over-the-counter market, which in May was listed on the American Stock Exchange.

In 1979, Truong sold R2E to Bull.

Friedl used the SCAMP prototype to gain approval within IBM to promote and develop IBM’s 5100 family of computers, including the most successful, the 5150, also known as the IBM Personal Computer (PC), introduced in 1981.

Sale to Honeywell in 1982

They cost $4,000 (today’s equivalent of $10,000), weighed two pounds, stood at a foot tall, took 10 hours to charge, and delivered only 30 minutes of talk time. For example, when Motorola introduced cellphones in the United States in 1983, they were dismissed as toys for the rich.

Apple introduces the Macintosh with a television commercial during the 1984 Super Bowl, which plays on the theme of totalitarianism in George Orwell´s book 1984.

Dell dropped out of school to focus on his business and in 1985, the company produced the first computer of its own design, the Turbo PC, which sold for $795.

In 1988 Honeywell sold Tetra Tech's engineering division, and its name, to a consortium consisting of company employees and a Los Angeles investment firm, Riordan Venture Management.

Apollo was a leading innovator in the workstation field for more than a decade, and was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 1989.

IBM had hoped to leverage Lotus 1-2-3 to challenge the increasingly demanded Microsoft Excel software, but alas, there was little slowing down the Microsoft juggernaut during the 1990’s.

In December 1991 the company went public yet again, offering 1.4 million shares of stock on the NASDAQ exchange.

The 2200 used a built-in CRT, cassette tape for storage, and ran the programming language BASIC. The PC era ended Wang’s success, and it filed for bankruptcy in 1992.

In December 1993 the company purchased Simons, Li & Associates, Inc., a California-based water resources engineering firm that specialized in urban drainage, flood control, bridge waterway design, and other types of civil engineering.

The year 1994 saw the acquisition of Simon Hydro-Search Inc., a Denver company specializing in water resource management.

1995: Acquisition of EMI

In early 1996 Tetra Tech announced that its various companies were in the process of signing contracts with federal and state government agencies worth nearly $800 million.

Another wireless firm, CommSite Development Corporation, was purchased in July 1997.

Annual sales for 1998 reached $382.9 million, more than triple the figure of just three years earlier.

In February 1999 Tetra Tech purchased environmental consulting and engineering firm McCulley, Frick & Gilman.

Much of this was due to the fact that IIS was often enabled by default on many installations of Windows NT and Windows 2000.

The Treo sold well, and the line continued until Handspring was purchased by Palm in 2003.

Lenovo, China's largest manufacturer of PCs, purchased IBM's personal computer business in 2005, largely to gain access to IBM's ThinkPad line of computers and sales force.

At the 2006 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) announces it will create a program to deliver technology and resources to targeted schools in the least developed countries.

By 2011, over 2.4 million laptops had been shipped.

Built by IBM using their Blue Gene/Q supercomputer architecture, the Sequoia system is the world's fastest supercomputer in 2012.