ASUS

Four engineers who had left Acer founded the company in Taipei in 1989. The name is Pegasus with the front cut off, deliberately, so it would land near the top of alphabetical listings. Through the 1990s ASUS was the motherboard enthusiasts bought, and for years it also quietly built hardware for other brands.

The Eee PC (2007) was a small, cheap laptop running Linux on a 7-inch screen. It sold far beyond expectations and kicked off the netbook craze, which Microsoft smothered by giving away Windows XP and Intel by keeping the Atom deliberately weak. In 2008 the contract manufacturing arm was spun off as Pegatron, so ASUS would stop competing with its own customers.