VMware was founded in 1998 by Diane Greene, Executive Vice President of EMC Corporation and President of VMware. 

Greene brings over twenty years performing in the technological field, including technical leadership positions at Tandem, a firm specializing in computer systems highly resistant to failure, Silicon Graphics, a pioneer in 3D graphics, Sybase, a leading firm dedicated to information management, and is also CEO of VXtreme, which was created in 1995 with the aim of producing a video solution for high quality Internet-focused businesses. 

She holds a Master degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley, also a Masters degree in naval architecture from the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and a BS in mechanical engineering from the University of Vermont. 

Greene founded the company with the original objective of importing the virtual machine technology from the mainframe-class to standard computers. VMware (Virtual Machine ware) produced its first product, VMware Workstation, in 1999 and entered the server market in 2001 with VMware GSX Server and VMware ESX Server. With the launch of VMware VirtualCenter in 2003 and the groundbreaking VMotion technology, the company ranked as one of the strongest market leaders in the newly emerging Virtual Infrastructure. VMware has kept being the leader of the Virtualization market with advanced features like FT, HA, DRS, Storage vMotion, Snapshots, and much more.

The following is the chronological order of the versions of VMware workstation

The first version of VMware Workstation VMware was 3 on September 16, 1998 
VMware Workstation 4 came out February 10, 2003 
VMware Workstation 4.5 came out on December 27, 2005 VMware Workstation 5 came out on July 4, 2005 
VMware Workstation 5.5 alio on April 26, 2007 
VMware Workstation and Workstation ACE Edition 6.0 came out on May 9, 2007

& less than a month back the amazing VMware Workstation 7 came out on 02 October 2009.

As a closing to this article, I would highly suggest you visit VMware website & download the new amazing VMware Workstation 7.0.