View the history of microcomputer companies in timeline form. Data can be filtered to UK or US only, or sorted by company name, company lifetime, the date the company was founded, and the date it died, was sold off or otherwise exited the computer business.

Dates used are those when a company produced computers of one sort or another, or was otherwise signficiant in the computer industry. The start date may also include the time from when a company produced hobbyist electronics, e.g. Heathkit, or calculators, e.g. Commodore or Hewlett-Packard.

It's telling to sort by defunct date, where the great mass extinction of micro companies between 1983 and 1986 can be seen as a cliff wall - an effect that's noticeably more marked in the UK. There's another smaller wall around the dot-com bubble of 2000, for the few companies that lived that long.

Click and drag, or swipe with a finger to move left or right, or drag vertically or use the mouse wheel to move up and down. Set the view scale using the buttons above the graph.