The Rochester Technology Campus is a facility shared by several companies in

Rochester, Minnesota Rochester is a city in Olmsted County, Minnesota, United States, and its county seat. It is located along rolling bluffs on the Zumbro River's south fork in Southeast Minnesota. At the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, the city had a popul ...

. The initial structure was designed by

Eero Saarinen Eero Saarinen (, ; August 20, 1910 – September 1, 1961) was a Finnish-American architect and industrial designer who created a wide array of innovative designs for buildings and monuments, including the General Motors Technical Center; the pa ...

, who clad the structure in

blue Blue is one of the three primary colours in the RYB color model, RYB colour model (traditional colour theory), as well as in the RGB color model, RGB (additive) colour model. It lies between Violet (color), violet and cyan on the optical spe ...

panels of varying hues after being inspired by the

Minnesota Minnesota ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Upper Midwestern region of the United States. It is bordered by the Canadian provinces of Manitoba and Ontario to the north and east and by the U.S. states of Wisconsin to the east, Iowa to the so ...

sky and the nickname of the first occupant, Big Blue.

History

Early years

IBM's CEO Thomas J. Watson Jr. reportedly chose the site of Rochester in honor of his copilot during

World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

, Leland Fiegel, who lived there. Groundbreaking took place on July 31, 1956. When it was first completed, there was of floor space. After expansion, it has on the main campus, more than half the size of

the Pentagon The Pentagon is the headquarters building of the United States Department of Defense, in Arlington County, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. The building was constructed on an accelerated schedule during World War II. As ...

Arlington, Virginia Arlington County, or simply Arlington, is a County (United States), county in the U.S. state of Virginia. The county is located in Northern Virginia on the southwestern bank of the Potomac River directly across from Washington, D.C., the nati ...

. The building was first dedicated in 1958, but has been expanded considerably since then.

Current developments

Employment at the site has gone through several cycles of growth and collapse, but is over twice what it was in the 1950s. On May 4, 2016, it was announced that IBM would consolidate its remaining employees into the eight buildings on the east side of the complex and sell the remaining facilitates to a separate entity. This occurred after years of IBM renting out its various facilities to companies it had spun or sold off such as HGST. The site's employee count (excluding contractors) was reported to be 2,740 in 2013 and 2,791 in 2017, a steep decline from the high of over 8,000. In February 2018 the property was sold to Industrial Realty Group of Los Angeles. On April 24, 2018, in a presentation to the local community, it was announced that the site was renamed Rochester Technology Campus.

Products

The mile-long facility is best known as the plant that produced the AS/400 computer system. The AS/400 system was itself an advancement of the System/38 that was introduced several years earlier with an inbuilt Relational Data Base Management System (RDBMS) making it leading edge for its time. The AS/400 was later rebranded as the iSeries. Development of the OS/400 operating system, now known as

IBM i IBM i (the ''i'' standing for ''integrated'') is an operating system developed by IBM for IBM Power Systems. It was originally released in 1988 as OS/400, as the sole operating system of the IBM AS/400 line of systems. It was renamed to i5/OS in 2 ...

, continues at Rochester. IBM Power Systems development is here. PureSystems were originally assembled at this site, but are now mainly assembled in New York and Mexico. The IBM 3740 Data Entry System was developed at the facility in 1973 and the follow-on IBM 5280 Distributed Data System had its beginnings there, but was transferred in 1981 to the Austin, TX facility, where it was released for production. The advent of personal computing swallowed up this type of data entry by 1990. The IBM 5110 personal computer was developed and manufactured in the facility. IBM Rochester was important to the

Summit A summit is a point on a surface that is higher in elevation than all points immediately adjacent to it. The topographic terms acme, apex, peak (mountain peak), and zenith are synonymous. The term (mountain top) is generally used only for ...

and Sierra supercomputers. RS/6000, now System p, and

hard disk A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating hard disk drive platter, pla ...

development occurred here.

Distinctions

The AS/400 division at the plant received the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 1990. In November 2004, the facility claimed the top spot in the

TOP500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computing, distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these ...

list of fast

supercomputer A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...

s with a prototype Blue Gene/L system containing 32,768 processors. It was clocked at 70.72

teraflop Floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate measur ...

s. The manufacturing output of the site is so great that if it was a separate company, it would be the world's third-largest computer producer. The plant, which is near U.S. Highway 52 in the northwestern part of Rochester, was recognized in 1990 by the National Building Museum as one of the significant contributions of IBM to the built environment of the

United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

, along with IBM's

New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...

headquarters and the IBM

building A building or edifice is an enclosed Structure#Load-bearing, structure with a roof, walls and window, windows, usually standing permanently in one place, such as a house or factory. Buildings come in a variety of sizes, shapes, and functions, a ...

Atlanta, Georgia Atlanta ( ) is the List of capitals in the United States, capital and List of municipalities in Georgia (U.S. state), most populous city in the U.S. state of Georgia (U.S. state), Georgia. It is the county seat, seat of Fulton County, Georg ...

Tenants

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies HGST, Inc. (Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) was a manufacturer of hard disk drives, solid-state drives, and external storage products and services. It was initially a subsidiary of Hitachi, formed through its acquisition of IBM's disk driv ...

, although having been spun off from IBM Storage Technology, remains on-site, leasing otherwise unused space from IBM. Along with the

Mayo Clinic Mayo Clinic () is a Nonprofit organization, private American Academic health science centre, academic Medical centers in the United States, medical center focused on integrated health care, healthcare, Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science ...

, the IBM plant is one of the biggest employers in the Rochester area, reportedly numbering around 5,000 in 2002. In 2019, Crenlo LLC rented part of the IBM facility to move part of its EMCORE manufacturing division, where it is currently separate from the Crenlo Cab Manufacturing line of products, as EMCORE was sold in 2021.

References

Sources

*(Winter 1990)
Honor Award 1990.
''Blueprints'' Vol. VIII, No. 1, p. 8. National Building Museum. *''IBM Rochester: A Half Century of Innovation'' (IBM, 2006—a commemorative history prepared by the

Charles Babbage Institute The IT History Society (ITHS) is an organization that supports the history and scholarship of information technology by encouraging, fostering, and facilitating archival and historical research. Formerly known as the Charles Babbage Foundation, ...

based on interviews and documentary research
available on line
from th
CBI website

Oral history interview with Glenn Henry

, University of Minnesota. Subjects include IBM Midrange AS/400 development at IBM Rochester.
IBM Rochester from the IBM Archives

External links

* {{Authority control IBM facilities Eero Saarinen structures Buildings and structures in Rochester, Minnesota