Forty-five years ago today, a brand that would become indelibly linked to the information age and affect countless lives across the globe was first registered as a trademark in the United States. On August 1, 1972, the Intel Corporation of Mountain View, California was granted U.S. Registration No. 939641 for the mark INTEL for “integrated circuits, registers and semiconductor memories.” In the 1970s and 1980s, INTEL chips were instrumental in ushering in the era of the personal computer, and the brand achieved near-monopoly status in the computer world in the 1990s. Today, the INTEL brand still reigns supreme, the 939641 registration is still in force, and the company remains the largest and most valuable chip maker in the world.

By Mwilde2 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.