Short answers, pulled from the story.
Altera delivered the industry's first reprogrammable logic device in 1984. The EP300 featured a quartz window that allowed users to shine an ultra-violet lamp on the die to erase EPROM cells.
In 2016 long-time industry rivals Xilinx and Altera controlled nearly 90 percent of the market. By 2013, Altera, Xilinx, and Actel together represented approximately 77 percent of the FPGA market.
On the 1st of June 2015, Intel announced it would acquire Altera for approximately US$16.7 billion. The acquisition completed on the 30th of December 2015 before Altera became independent again in February 2024.
Microchip acquired Actel in 2018 and Atmel in 2016. Tabula officially shut down on the 24th of March 2015 after announcing their time-multiplexed logic technology in 2010.
Microsoft began using FPGAs to accelerate Bing search engine operations in 2014. They deployed FPGAs across other data center workloads for their Azure cloud computing platform starting in 2018.