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Comment by Michael_Sieb | Hacker News Reader

I don't think any tech companies will ever survive that long.

Let's hope not.

A small, geographically bound family business like this is one thing, but we should pay more attention to what kind of creatures we're creating in the long run.

An LLC is a very useful legal fiction, but more and more we're seeing the effects of allowing virtually unbounded, private for profit organizations.

Could Nintendo be the oldest company currently involved with tech?

'tech' is kind of a broad brush. But Nintendo is even older than old behemoths like GE and IBM.

Yep, IBM was founded in 1911

Its constituent companies were older, though. Hollerith's original Tabulating Machine patent was filed in 1884, and his machines and punch cards were used for the 1890 census.

Define "tech"?

Nintendo was founded in 1889.

As just one counter-example; I'm sure there are plenty more/earlier: Siemens was founded in 1847 (edit: by building telegraph equipment and infrastructure).

Edit: I'm sure there must have been earlier companies involved in "tech" that are still relevant? Maybe let's think about "tech" as "information technology" companies?

Making playing cards, IIRC. Was that considered tech back then?

In the case of Nintendo: probably not.

Kiewit is the precursor company to MFS and Level 3 Communications. Level3 merged with CenturyLink and is now known as Lumen.

Kiewit formed in 1884.

It's probably Isabellenhütte, established in 1482 in Germany (https://www.isabellenhuette.de/en/company/innovation-by-trad...)

Who currently produce components that go into Teslas.

I was originally looking for "old companies that currently work in tech", but even their original industry of copper smelting was pretty high tech for the 15th century.

Maybe let's do it in two classes: oldest information-managing tech company and oldest mechanical tech company?

I mean, I don't know what other definition you want.

If you consider banking to be information-managing tech (which it seems to me that it is), then the oldest may be either Berenberg Bank (1590) or Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena (1472). It depends on the definition of "bank". The later is certainly a bank now, but was more like a pawnbroker in its early years.

Ericsson was founded in 1876 and had a big part in developing 5G. Nokia started in 1865. There must be many 19:th century tech companies around.

British Telecom’s origins date back to the founding in 1846 of the Electric Telegraph Company. ETC was the first public telegraph company.

That's got Western Union beat by a few years. WU was founded in 1851.

On the other hand, Western Union is still trading under its original name.

If any were to, I'd hope it'd be YouTube. For better or worse, it's an amazing repository of what it is to be human in the early 21st century in terms of the billions of hours of evidence that people record and upload. Imagine being an archaeologist in 1000 years having access to this.

Isn't history being written everyday?

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