Most of America’s largest companies are also among its oldest companies. In fact, many of the Fortune 100 firms are more than a century old. Almost none were founded in the past 25 years, and not a single one was founded in the past decade. Longevity is one of the keys to success for corporations that consistently have billions of dollars in sales each year. A few companies, however, break the trend. 24/7 Wall St. analyzed the Fortune 100 companies and found the 10 youngest.

Read: The Newest Fortune 100 Companies

In the past year, excitement in the press and on Wall Street centered on companies that are only a few years old. Groupon (NASDAQ: GRPN), LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD) and FriendFinder (NASDAQ: FFN) had little trouble raising money in the pubic capital markets. Many of those stocks have fallen since their market premiere, but analysts still expect new companies like to Zynga and Facebook to have tremendous valuations when they go public. What these companies share beyond “buzz” is that they are not only new but also small. Facebook, by most estimates, will have revenue of $4 billion this year. It is still not clear whether its social network model can be sustained as a big business, even if it does have 750 million members.

24/7 Wall St. analyzed all of the corporations on the most recent Fortune 100 list to find which of them had been founded most recently. Eight are technology companies. This is not surprising because over the past 40 years, the growth of software, PCs and portable electronic devices has been extraordinary. The other two corporations are big-box retailers — Costco (NASDAQ: COST) and Home Depot (NYSE: HD). They are part of a trend started in the 1960s by Walmart (NYSE: WMT) to build very large stores, staff them modestly and charge prices well below those available in niche stores or boutiques.

Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) and Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) seem to have been around for a long time. For Americans under 30, they have. However, major and sustained revenue success is linked to age, among other things. Facebook may make it onto the Fortune 100, but it will take years for its revenue to get to $20 billion or $30 billion. If it gets there, there is no guarantee it can maintain that level of sales for decades like the youngest Fortune 100 companies have.

24/7 Wall St. identified the 10 companies present on the 2011 edition of the Forbes Fortune 100. When companies merged, we looked at the founding date of each company and took the oldest. In addition to annual revenue of the most recent fiscal year, as well as Fortune 100 rank, 24/7 included the industry and number of employees, provided by Google Finance.

10. Microsoft
> Year founded: 1975
> Industry: Software
> Sales: $62.4 billion
> # of employees: 90,000
> Fortune 100 rank: 38

Founded in 1975 at Harvard by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Microsoft began as a small software company developing software for the ALTAIR 8800. Founding their operating system, MS-DOS, in the 1980s, Microsoft exploded into the largest software company in the world. The first version of the Windows operating system premiered in 1985. Windows took the world by a storm, and soon was found on most of the world’s computers. Microsoft’s initial public stock offering was in 1986. The company has since branched into other areas, including their Xbox game consoles and their search engine, Bing.

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9. Costco Wholesale
> Year founded: 1976
> Industry: Retail
> Sales: $77.9 billion
> # of employees: 92,000
> Fortune 100 rank: 28

Costco, originally called Price Club, opened its first store in San Diego in 1976 in a former airline hanger. After several years of selling wholesale, the retailer decided to branch into noncorporate sales by offering private customer memberships. The end results were highly successful, and Costco became the first company in the country to grow from zero to $3 billion in less than six years. The company went public in 1985 and is now the 28th largest company in the U.S. with 92,000 employees and hundreds of locations worldwide.

8. Apple
> Year founded: 1976
> Industry: Consumer electronics
> Sales: $65.2 billion
> # of employees: 60,400
> Fortune 100 rank: 35

Apple was founded by Steve Jobs, Ronald Wayne and Steve Wozniak in 1976, a year after eventual rival Microsoft. The company began very small, selling the Apple I computer kits to enthusiasts. Later versions of Apple’s personal computers, including the Macintosh, iMac and MacBook, solidified the company as a solid contender in the computer industry. What really made Apple one of the biggest tech companies in the world was the later success of its consumer electronics division. The iPod personal music player became a must-have item in the early 2000s, and the iPhone, another massive success, propelled the company’s revenue to 35th in the U.S.

7. Oracle
> Year founded: 1977
> Industry: Software
> Sales: $26.8 billion
> # of employees: 109,388
> Fortune 100 rank: 96

Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) was founded by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates in 1977 in silicon valley as Software Development Laboratories. The company’s early focus was database software, and it continued to develop increasingly popular versions of its Oracle software through its 1986 initial public stock offering. In the 1990s, the company developed other widely used software products. In 2010, Oracle acquired competitor Sun Microsystems, known for its development of the Java programming language and platform among others.

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6. Home Depot
> Year founded: 1978
> Industry: Home improvement
> Sales: $68.0 billion
> # of employees: 189,390
> Fortune 100 rank: 30

Home Depot was founded in 1978 in Atlanta, Ga., by Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank. Since opening its first two locations in Atlanta in 1979, the company’s basic corporate design of starting large home improvement retail warehouses has not changed. The business model proved successful and it was only three years before shares of the company stock premiered on the Nasdaq stock exchange, and then the New York Stock Exchange in 1984. On its corporate website, Home Depot describes itself as the fastest-growing retailer in U.S. history.

5. Ingram Micro
> Year founded: 1979
> Industry: Computer hardware
> Sales: $34.6 billion
> # of employees: 15,650
> Fortune 100 rank: 75

Micro D was founded in 1979, and Ingram Computer was founded in 1982. The two merged to form Ingram Micro (NYSE: IM) in 1989. Built off a series of strategic acquisitions, the company expanded its business from the United States to become one of the biggest global distributors of software and IT services. The company went public in 1996, and is now a $34 billion, 15,600 employee corporation.

4. Cisco Systems
> Year founded: 1984
> Industry: Communications equipment
> Sales: $40.0 billion
> # of employees: 71,825
> Fortune 100 rank: 62

Cisco was founded in 1984 by Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner in San Jose, Calif. The company’s first specialty was internet routers. While it was not the only or first company to produce routers, it certainly was one of the most commercially successful in the early days of the internet, leading to Cisco’s premiere on the Nasdaq exchange in 1990. Over the next 20 years, Cisco developed into the dominant provider of business networking infrastructure.

3. Dell
> Year founded: 1984
> Industry: Computer hardware
> Sales: $61.5 billion
> # of employees: 100,300
> Fortune 100 rank: 41

Dell (NASDAQ: DELL), originally called PC’s Limited, was founded by current chairman and CEO Michael Dell while he was still a student at the University of Texas at Austin. Dell began building personal computers out of his dorm room, although the company did not design its own model, the Turbo PC, until 1985. In 1988, with growing popularity, the company changed its name to Dell Computer Corporation and had its initial public stock offering. It exploded from a $1,000 small business to an $85 million enterprise in just four years. The company’s success grew as it branched into other home computer devices, including printers and laptops.

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2. Amazon.com
> Year founded: 1994
> Industry: Internet retail
> Sales: $34.2 billion
> # of employees: 43,200
> Fortune 100 rank: 78

Amazon.com was founded as an online bookstore in 1994 by current chairman and CEO Jeff Bezos. Unlike many of the new internet-only companies of the early 1990s, Amazon’s strategy was slow growth, which was one of the reasons it survived the dot-com bubble burst around the turn of the century. Amazon has since expanded its selection to every kind of consumer good available on the market. Amazon also sells the Kindle e-book reader, which overtook the competition to eventually dominate the market.

1. Google
> Year founded: 1996
> Industry: Search engine
> Sales: $29.3 billion
> # of employees: 31,353
> Fortune 100 rank: 92

Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is the youngest company on the Fortune 100. Founded just 15 years ago at Stanford by (then students) Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the company’s original search engine was called BackRub. In 1998, the pair renamed their engine “Google” and began working out of a garage in Silicon Valley. In 2004, Google had its initial public stock offering, and, with a reportedly superior search algorithm, it survived the dot-com bubble when a dozen other major search companies went bankrupt. Over the past decade, Google has expanded its site to include a variety of tools, including the popular email service Gmail. It also produces the popular Android smartphone operating system.

-Michael B. Sauter, Douglas A. McIntyre

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