ADP, LLC., is an American provider of business outsourcing solutions. It was also a provider of computing services to automobile and heavy equipment dealers, but spun off those businesses in 2014. ADP was formerly one of four American companies to get a AAA credit rating from Standard & Poor's and Moody's, In 1949 Henry Taub founded Automatic Payrolls, Inc. as a manual payroll processing business with his brother Joe Taub. Frank Lautenberg joined the brothers in the company's infancy. In 1952, Lautenberg became Chairman and CEO of the company. In 1957, the company changed its name to Automatic Data Processing, Inc., and began using punched card machines, check printing machines, and mainframe computers. ADP went public in 1961 with 300 clients, 125 employees and revenues of approximately US$400,000. The company established a subsidiary in the United Kingdom in 1965 and acquired the pioneering online computer services company Time Sharing Limited in 1974. Lautenberg continued in his roles as Chairman and CEO until elected to the United States Senate from New Jersey in 1982.
Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen on April 4, 1975, to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for Altair 8800. It rose to dominate the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by Microsoft Windows. The company's 1986 initial public offering, and subsequent rise in its share price, created three billionaires and an estimated 12,000 millionaires from Microsoft employees. Since the 1990s, it has increasingly diversified from the operating system market and has made a number of corporate acquisitions. In May 2011, Microsoft acquired Skype Technologies for $8.5 billion in its largest acquisition to date.