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Silicon Valley's First Hard Drive Was Built by a Company Born in Upstate New York
IBM's San Jose lab shipped the first commercial hard disk drive in 1956, from a plant built for wartime manufacturing. Seventy years later, the same region is the site of a $100 billion Micron memory-chip megafab -- the largest single manufacturing investment in New York State history.
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Where this connects
Silicon Valley's Largest Employer for Decades Wasn't a Tech Company. It Was a Missile Plant.
The garage-startup story leaves out the tenant that mattered most: by 1959, Lockheed Missiles and Space Company employed nearly 20,000 pe...
Boston Got There First. Then It Lost the Lead to Silicon Valley on Purpose.
Route 128, completed in 1956, was the nation's first real high-tech corridor -- built on defense money five years before Silicon Valley. ...
IBM Anchored Research Triangle Park for 60 Years. It's Packing Up the Same Year the Region Pulled In $10.8 Billion.
Research Triangle Park opened in 1959 as a deliberate state bet on three nearby universities. IBM anchored it for sixty years as its larg...
The US Makes 12% of the World's Semiconductors, Down From 37% in 1990. Micron — Born in a Boise Basement — Just Broke Ground on the Fab Meant to Help Fix That.
US semiconductor manufacturing has fallen from 37% of world supply in 1990 to about 12% today. Micron, founded in 1978 in the basement of...
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