VMware's stock closed its first day at $51, up 76 percent, in the biggest tech IPO since Google. The company sold a trick that sounded like magic: software that split one physical computer into several make-believe ones, each running its own operating system. Data centers were full of servers that sat mostly idle. VMware let companies pack that work onto fewer boxes. By the summer of 2007, it was the quiet engine inside corporate computer rooms.

A Stanford Lab Idea

Diane Greene, her husband Mendel Rosenblum, and three colleagues founded VMware in Palo Alto in 1998. Rosenblum's research at Stanford showed that a thin layer of software could fool an operating system into thinking it had a whole machine to itself. Their first product let a single PC run Windows and Linux side by side. The bigger prize was the server room. In 2004 EMC, the storage giant, bought VMware and kept it running as its own business.

Passed From Owner to Owner

EMC sold a slice of VMware to the public at $29 a share on August 13, 2007, and the stock began trading on the NYSE the next day. EMC kept control. In 2008 it replaced Greene as chief executive with Paul Maritz. Dell bought EMC in 2016, and VMware came along with it. Dell spun VMware off in 2021. In November 2023 Broadcom closed its purchase of VMware for about $69 billion.

Cover: Branch of the Seine near Giverny (Mist), Claude Monet. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a river and its mirror image in the mist (a virtual copy).