Siemens

Werner von Siemens and Johann Georg Halske set up shop in Berlin in 1847 with an improved pointer telegraph. During the Second World War Siemens & Halske built the T52 cipher machine, the one Sweden called the Geheimschreiber. In computing terms the company matters most for SIMATIC, the automation brand that since the 1950s has grown into the world's most common PLC family, these days networked over PROFINET.

That dominance is what made the S7 controllers the target of Stuxnet in 2010, the worm that sabotaged uranium centrifuges at Natanz and that Ralph Langner was first to pick apart. The chip business became Infineon in 1999, and the Siemens Nixdorf computer venture briefly became Europe's largest before being broken up.