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DHL began in 1969 with Larry Hillblom, a UC Berkeley law student who flew overnight between Oakland and Los Angeles as an insurance courier. He teamed with Adrian Dalsey and Robert Lynn, and their initials became the name. Their first big client was Seatrain Lines: DHL flew bills of lading from Honolulu to San Francisco in suitcases on commercial flights so cargo ships could unload on arrival. The three shared a Plymouth Duster and paid with early corporate credit cards, and first hires Max and Blanche Kroll let couriers sleep in their Hawaii apartment. The inter-island DHL Air Cargo, flying DC-3 and DC-6 aircraft from 1979, went bankrupt in 1983.

Deutsche Post began buying DHL shares in 1998 and owned all of it by December 2002, moving headquarters to Bonn. It bought Airborne Express in 2003, but after losses in the 2008 crisis DHL cut 9,500 U.S. jobs and quit domestic U.S. pickup and delivery, keeping only international shipments. German ownership left it outside U.S. embargoes, so it serves Cuba and North Korea. It carried U.S. mail in Iraq and Afghanistan, where executives David Giles and Jason Bresler were killed in Kabul in 2008. It moved Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines in 2020, bought StreetScooter in 2014, and in April 2025 suspended U.S. consumer deliveries worth over $800 after customs rule changes.

• The company now generates about 84 billion euros and moves 2,000 tons of Cirque du Soleil equipment in 80 containers.
• Its Go Green target is zero logistics-related emissions by 2050, with recycled cooking oil fuel for cargo planes.
• From 2022 its U.S. trucks carried solar mats that power lift gates and onboard equipment.
• In December 2025 it fought a 206 percent surge in text message tracking scams.
• Sponsorships include Formula One's fastest lap award and a 40 million pound Manchester United training kit deal.

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DC Comics began in 1935 when Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson launched National Allied Publications and the magazine New Fun, betting on original stories rather than newspaper reprints. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster introduced Dr. Occult that year. Deep in debt to distributor Harry Donenfeld, the major formed a lopsided partnership to publish Detective Comics, the source of the DC initials, and Donenfeld and accountant Jack Liebowitz forced him out and bought his company at a bankruptcy auction. Action Comics No. 1 introduced Superman in June 1938, and Detective Comics No. 27 introduced Batman in May 1939. The company then sued Fawcett for over a decade until Captain Marvel ceased publication in 1953.

Editor Julius Schwartz and artist Carmine Infantino relaunched the Flash in Showcase No. 4 in 1956, and the 1961 story Flash of Two Worlds created the multiverse. DC executives blamed Marvel's success on red ink and cover word balloons, and Jack Kirby's 1970 arrival brought the Fourth World and Darkseid. Publisher Jenette Kahn's 1978 DC Explosion collapsed into the DC Implosion, but royalties lured Marv Wolfman and George Pérez to create The New Teen Titans. Crisis on Infinite Earths compressed the multiverse in 1985, followed by Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, the 1990s speculator bust, and the Vertigo, Milestone and Wildstorm imprints. After a 2026 acquisition, DC became a publishing unit of Skydance.

• Because Fawcett abandoned the name, Marvel took the Captain Marvel trademark in 1967, so DC later titled its book Shazam.
• DC also sued Fox Comics over a character called Wonder Man.
• A 1971 Green Lantern and Green Arrow story revealed that Green Arrow's sidekick Speedy had a heroin addiction.
• The 1990s boom sold killed-Superman and broken-Batman issues in sealed polybags with foil covers.
• In 2024 DC returned to the 1977 bullet logo designed by Milton Glaser.

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The Soviet launch of Sputnik 1 in October 1957 led President Eisenhower to authorize the Advanced Research Projects Agency in February 1958, with $520 million and a place inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Its first director, Roy Johnson, left a $160,000 job at General Electric to take the post for $18,000. When NASA formed later in 1958, ARPA lost its civilian space work and most of its funding, and Johnson resigned. The agency pivoted to high-risk basic research: Project Defender for missile defense, Project Vela for nuclear test detection, and the Navy's Transit satellite system with Johns Hopkins, which used the Doppler effect and became a precursor to GPS.

Under director Jack Ruina, J.C.R. Licklider ran the Information Processing Techniques Office, funding time-sharing at MIT and leading to ARPANET, the first wide-area packet switching network. ARPA also backed Douglas Engelbart's NLS hypertext system and the Aspen Movie Map. The 1973 Mansfield Amendment restricted defense research to direct military uses, pushing computer scientists toward Xerox PARC and startups while the agency turned to stealth and lasers, producing the F-117 Nighthawk. After 9/11 its Information Awareness Office pursued Total Information Awareness and the LifeLog project; Congress defunded the office in 2003, though Edward Snowden's 2013 disclosures showed some of its concepts persisted under other names.

• Packet switching splits data into pieces that route around a destroyed node, a design aimed at surviving a nuclear strike.
• The Mansfield Amendment's funding squeeze helped push DARPA-trained talent into the personal computer industry.
• In 2024 an AI flew a modified F-16 against a human pilot in the first human versus AI dogfight.
• The RACER program builds off-road autonomous vehicles, and Manta Ray develops underwater drones that can hibernate on the seafloor.
• The DRACO project with NASA and Lockheed Martin aims to build a nuclear thermal rocket.

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Cyrix was founded in Richardson, Texas, in 1988 by Jerry Rogers and Tom Brightman. It started with math coprocessors such as the FasMath 83D87, which used hardware multipliers instead of Intel's CORDIC algorithm and ran faster on less power. Its 486SLC and 486DLC chips ran 486 instructions while fitting older 386 motherboards. With about 300 employees and no factory of its own, Cyrix contracted production to Texas Instruments and SGS-Thomson. When Intel sued over patents, Cyrix won in federal and state courts in Texas, filed antitrust counterclaims, and Intel paid it $12 million to settle before trial in Sherman, Texas.

A deal with IBM Microelectronics gave Cyrix volume, though IBM could sell Cyrix designs under its own brand. The 1995 6x86 beat Pentiums on business software and was sold with PR ratings, so a 133 MHz part was labeled P166+. But its floating point unit lacked pipelining, and John Carmack's Quake, tuned for the Pentium, crawled on it. The 1996 MediaGX put CPU, audio and graphics on one chip and sold by the millions to Compaq and Packard Bell. After a 1997 merger with National Semiconductor, the MII ran hot and its 83 MHz bus pushed peripherals to 41.5 MHz. Engineers left, the remains went to VIA Technologies, and the MediaGX lived on as the Geode line that AMD acquired.

• The 1996 film Eraser digitally changed its villain company from Cyrex to Cyrez after Cyrix objected.
• Clean room reverse engineering used two isolated teams, one documenting what a chip does and one designing from that manual alone.
• Centaur Technology CEO Glenn Henry called National Semiconductor a big smokestack company.
• The MII also lacked an instruction needed to fully use the Sound Blaster AWE64 sound card.
• AMD's 2006 Geode version ran on 0.9 watts, and Intel created its Celeron budget line to compete at the low end.

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Curtiss-Wright formed on July 5, 1929, when the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company of Buffalo and Wright Aeronautical of Dayton consolidated 12 companies with $75 million in capital, becoming the largest aviation company in the United States. Its airplane, engine and propeller divisions carried it through the Depression on military engine contracts, and under president Guy Vaughan the P-36 fighter won the Army Air Corps' largest peacetime aircraft order. In World War II it was the second largest U.S. contractor by value after General Motors, employing 180,000 people and building 142,840 engines, 29,269 airplanes and 146,468 electric propellers, including nearly 14,000 P-40 Warhawks and more than 3,000 C-46 Commandos.

The push for volume had costs. A mostly wooden C-76 Caravan built in Louisville crashed in 1943, and at an Ohio engine plant from 1941 to 1943 company officials and Army inspectors approved defective engines for military aircraft. With little spent on radical research during the war, the company missed the jet age, and after the Air Force chose Northrop's F-89 over its XF-87 Blackhawk in 1948, it closed its airplane division and sold the assets to North American Aviation. It turned to flight simulators, licensed jet and rotary engines, and later to valves for nuclear plants and actuators for aerospace. Now based in Davidson, North Carolina, under CEO Lynn Bamford, it reported $3.5 billion in 2025 revenue.

• The C-46 could fly heavy cargo over the Himalayas, making it the backbone of China-Burma-India supply routes.
• Its Buffalo flight research lab was handed to Cornell University with cash to finish a wind tunnel, later becoming Calspan.
• In 1954 it sold four flight simulators with sound, visuals and moving cockpits to United Airlines for $3 million.
• In the late 1950s it briefly managed the struggling Studebaker-Packard automobile company.
• Acquisitions include Penny and Giles flight recorders in 2002 and Pacific Star Communications for $400 million.

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A credit default swap is a contract in which a buyer pays regular premiums, called the spread, to a seller who promises a payout if a reference entity defaults on its debt. The modern version took shape at J.P. Morgan in 1994 under Blythe Masters. Exxon, facing a possible $5 billion in punitive damages over the Exxon Valdez spill, asked for a $4.8 billion credit line, and Basel I rules would have forced the bank to hold 8 percent of it in reserve. J.P. Morgan paid the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development to take on the default risk, freeing its capital. In 1997 the bank built BISTRO, chopping credit risk into small pieces, an early form of the synthetic CDO.

The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 declared swaps neither futures nor securities, leaving them outside SEC and CFTC oversight. Naked swaps, bought by people who did not own the underlying debt, grew to about 80 percent of the market, and notional value rose from $300 billion in 1998 to $62.2 trillion by the end of 2007. Lehman Brothers had about $155 billion in debt but roughly $400 billion in swaps written against it, though netting meant only about $7.2 billion changed hands. AIG had sold protection without reserves and needed an $85 billion federal rescue. Central clearinghouses arrived in 2009, yet in 2012 the trader known as the London Whale lost J.P. Morgan $2 billion on CDS index bets.

• Settlement can be physical, handing over defaulted bonds for par value, or cash, paying the gap between face value and market price.
• Unlike insurers, swap sellers were not required to keep cash reserves backed by actuarial math.
• AIG's models treated defaults like independent car crashes, but in the housing bust they all failed together.
• In 2011 the IRS proposed treating swaps as notional principal contracts rather than insurance.
• George Soros called the instruments toxic, and Warren Buffett called derivatives financial weapons of mass destruction.

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Countrywide Financial was founded in 1969 by David S. Loeb and Angelo Mozilo and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1985. Over two decades its stock returned 23,000 percent, and by 2006 it financed 20 percent of all U.S. mortgages, worth about 3.5 percent of U.S. GDP. It originated loans, packaged and traded mortgage-backed securities through its own capital markets arm, ran Countrywide Bank, the third largest savings and loan, and sold insurance through Balboa Life and Casualty. It spun off IndyMac in 1997. By 2006, 45 percent of its mortgages were nonconforming, and its underwriting allowed loans to families with as little as $1,000 a month left after payments. Its VIP program, Friends of Angelo, gave below-market mortgages to Senators Chris Dodd and Kent Conrad and Fannie Mae executives James Johnson and Franklin Raines.

In the first week of August 2007 the secondary market for nonconforming loans froze, Countrywide warned the SEC its financial condition was threatened, and by August 10 depositors were lining up in a run on Countrywide Bank. It drew down an $11.5 billion credit line from 40 banks, and regulators bent rules so Bank of America could inject $2 billion. In early 2008 Bank of America agreed to buy the company in stock for $2.5 billion, against a market value of $24 billion a year earlier, after 60 analysts spent four weeks on its books. Bank of America reached a nearly $17 billion settlement in 2014 and agreed to modify $8.4 billion in loans after state suits. Mozilo, who sold $291.5 million in stock from 2005 to 2007, was charged by the SEC with insider trading and securities fraud.

• Countrywide paid $30 million in 2003 to settle a class action over denied overtime for employees working 60 to 75 hours a week.
• Customers hit by Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Gustav said deferred payments were later demanded in one lump sum within 30 days.
• New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer secured a settlement over steering Black and Hispanic borrowers into high-cost loans.
• Its Protect Our House campaign reportedly had staff sign loyalty oaths and wear green rubber wristbands.
• Countrywide ran a UK loan processing joint venture with Barclays and offshore tech support in India.

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Convair, formally Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corporation, was formed in 1943 when Consolidated Aircraft and Vultee Aircraft merged to meet wartime demand. It ranked fourth among U.S. corporations in wartime production contracts, ahead of Douglas, Boeing and Lockheed. With its contractors it built about 18,500 B-24 Liberators, still the most produced bomber and the most produced American military aircraft, plus over 4,000 PBY Catalinas. General Dynamics bought the company in 1953. Convair pioneered the delta wing in the U.S. with the F-102 Delta Dagger, F-106 Delta Dart and B-58 Hustler, and built the B-36 Peacemaker, the largest land-based piston bomber, with six pusher propellers and four jets: six turning and four burning.

Its jet airliners, the Convair 880 and 990, were smaller but faster than the Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8, and airlines balked at the fuel burn; only 65 and 37 were built, and Convair became a fuselage subcontractor for McDonnell Douglas. Its rockets fared better. The Atlas, revived in the 1950s as a liquid-fueled ICBM, launched John Glenn's Friendship 7 in 1962, and the Centaur upper stage was the first widely used rocket to burn liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. Atlas-Centaur launched Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11. Between 1992 and 1994 General Dynamics sold the divisions to Hughes Aircraft, Martin Marietta, Lockheed and McDonnell Douglas, and by 1996 the remaining entities were deactivated.

• The Atlas used stainless steel balloon tanks so thin they had to stay pressurized to avoid collapsing.
• Convair developed the CORDIC algorithms, which compute trigonometric functions with addition, subtraction and bit shifting and are still used in calculators.
• The Kearny Mesa complex was demolished for homes and office parks.
• The Lindbergh Field plant where B-24s were assembled became a consolidated rental car facility for San Diego's airport.
• The July 1994 end of the MD-11 fuselage contract moved the last manufacturing out of San Diego, where Convair had employed 18,000 people.

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Conrail was the federal answer to the collapse of Northeastern railroading. The 1968 merger of the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central formed Penn Central, which went bankrupt in 1970 amid clashing cultures and lost trains. Hurricane Agnes in 1972 washed out track and pushed lines such as the Erie Lackawanna into ruin, and by late 1973 Penn Central threatened to stop running trains. President Nixon signed the Regional Rail Reorganization Act in early 1974, creating the United States Railway Association to plan a new carrier. The Consolidated Rail Corporation began April 1, 1976, combining seven bankrupt railroads including Penn Central, Erie Lackawanna, Reading, Central Railroad of New Jersey and Lehigh Valley, with the government owning 85 percent and employees 15 percent. It still lost $2.2 billion from 1976 to 1982.

The Staggers Act of 1980 let railroads set rates and abandon losing routes, and the 1981 Northeast Rail Service Act moved commuter service to agencies that became Metro-North, NJ Transit, SEPTA and the MBTA. L. Stanley Crane, former CEO of Southern Railway, cut 4,400 miles of track carrying about 1 percent of traffic, and Conrail turned profitable. After a sale to Norfolk Southern fell apart in 1986, President Reagan signed the Conrail Privatization Act, and in March 1987 the government's 85 percent stake sold for $1.65 billion, then the largest IPO in U.S. history. A 1997 merger plan with CSX set off a bidding war with Norfolk Southern, and on June 1, 1999, Norfolk Southern took 58 percent of the assets and CSX 42 percent.

• The split roughly restored the old Pennsylvania Railroad and New York Central lines to separate owners.
• Conrail Shared Assets Operations, jointly owned by CSX and Norfolk Southern, still runs terminals in North and South Jersey, Philadelphia and Detroit.
• Engineers once had to qualify on up to seven operating rule books, replaced by the shared NORAC rulebook.
• Conrail standardized on tri-light signals, which have no moving parts, unlike searchlight signals.
• Its locomotives wore Bright Future Blue, and Norfolk Southern, CSX, NJ Transit and SEPTA have painted heritage units in it.

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Coinbase began in 2012 when Brian Armstrong, a software engineer at Airbnb, received $150,000 from Y Combinator and recruited former Goldman Sachs trader Fred Ehrsam after spotting him on Reddit. A third founder, British programmer Ben Reeves, split with Armstrong over custody: Reeves wanted users to hold their own keys, while Armstrong wanted Coinbase to hold them like a bank. The company reached a million users by 2014, insured the Bitcoin on its servers, drew investment from Andreessen Horowitz and the New York Stock Exchange, and partnered with Dell, Expedia and Dish Network. In 2019 its security team stopped an attack that used fake Cambridge University pages and Firefox zero-day flaws. In 2020 it declared itself remote first with no headquarters, and Armstrong offered severance to employees who disagreed with his apolitical mission policy.

Coinbase listed on Nasdaq in April 2021, posted $7.8 billion in revenue that year and briefly reached a $47 billion valuation, then lost over $2.6 billion in 2022 and cut about 18 percent of staff. Former product manager Ishan Wahi was caught tipping off his brother and a friend about upcoming token listings, was stopped before a May 16 flight to India, and received two years in prison. New York regulators fined the company $50 million, and the SEC sued in June 2023, calling it an unregistered exchange, broker and clearing agency. The SEC dropped the case in February 2025 and Coinbase joined the S&P 500. By the 2026 cycle it had given over $57 million in political contributions, largely to the Fairshake super PAC.

• In December 2021 a display glitch briefly showed some users trillion-dollar balances.
• Coinbase controls roughly 12 percent of all Bitcoin and holds over half a trillion dollars in digital assets.
• In 2021 it eliminated salary negotiations, giving the same offer to anyone in the same role and location.
• Its compliance team had a backlog of 100,000 uninvestigated alerts.
• Refusing a $20 million ransom in May 2025, it offered a $20 million bounty and committed up to $400 million to reimburse customers.