Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Hindu was founded on the 20th of September 1878 in Madras by the Triplicane Six, a group of four law students and two teachers. The leading figures were G. Subramania Iyer, a schoolteacher from Tanjore district, and M. Veeraraghavacharyar, a lecturer at Pachaiyappa's College. It began as a weekly publication and became a daily in 1889.
The Hindu has been family-owned since 1905, when S. Kasturi Ranga Iyengar purchased it from the original founders. It is now jointly owned by Iyengar's descendants through the holding company Kasturi and Sons Ltd., whose board had twelve directors as of 2010.
The Hindu led Indian coverage of the Bofors arms deal scandal beginning in April 1987. Over six months, it published scores of original documents showing secret payments of $50 million into Swiss bank accounts. The investigation was led by correspondent Chitra Subramaniam from Geneva, and the paper's editorial accused Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi of being party to massive fraud and a cover-up.
Yes, The Hindu was the first newspaper in India to launch a website. It went live at thehindu.com in 1995. The site was first redesigned in 2009, with the beta version launching on the 15th of August 2009 and going fully live on the 24th of June 2010.
In 1965, The Times listed The Hindu as one of the world's ten best newspapers, describing it as 'the most respected paper in India.' In 1968, the American Newspaper Publishers Association awarded it the World Press Achievement Award.
When N. Ram resigned in 2011, he appointed Siddharth Varadarajan as editor-in-chief, breaking the paper's tradition of family editorial control. The board of directors voted 6-6 on reviewing the appointment, and Ram broke the tie himself in his capacity as chairman. Varadarajan served until 2013, the only editor in the paper's history to hold the post outside the founding family's direction.