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Comment by lapetitejort | Hacker News Reader

Could Nintendo be the oldest company currently involved with tech?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

'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.

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