The story
Founded by Justin Frankel in 2004.1
Cockos was founded in 2004 by Justin Frankel after his departure from Nullsoft. The company name stems from mis-hearing a quote from the movie Office Space.
While the company also develops small software tools often released under an open source license its main focus is on music software. They released their first music software product, a programmable effects processor called Jesusonic, on December 21, 2004. Following up in 2005, they released the online music jam software NINJAM under the GPL, with the release of their flagship product REAPER following later that year.
From Wikipedia’s article on Cockos, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3