Before there was technology in Orange County, there was aerospace.
Unlike Silicon Valley, which developed as a tech center with the brains of Stanford University and the money of San Francisco, OC’s tech pedigree is rooted in rockets, planes and space shuttles.
Rockwell International Corp., TRW Inc. and others dominated the landscape before Broadcom Corp., Western Digital Corp. and others came along.
“Orange County had done a great job transitioning from aerospace-focused companies to all sorts of storage and networking companies,” said H.K. Desai, chief executive of Aliso Viejo-based storage data networking company QLogic Corp. “They mostly all came out of aerospace backgrounds.”
Rockwell International, a onetime maker of space shuttles and satellites, spanned a handful of tech companies here as well as Cedar Rapids, Iowa-based Rockwell Collins Inc., which has operations in OC.
Rockwell’s history here starts with Collins Radio Co., a maker of communications gear for U.S. space programs that moved a division from Burbank to Newport Beach in 1961.
That unit was bought in 1973 by Rockwell and became the company’s semi-conductor arm.
In 1994, Rockwell opened its own chip plant in Newport Beach, one of the few to ever operate in OC. A few years later, the company spun off its chip unit as Conexant Systems Inc., which went public in 1999.
Conexant, in turn, spawned other chipmakers, including Jazz Semiconductor Inc. and Mindspeed Technologies Inc., both in Newport Beach, and Woburn, Mass.-based Skyworks Solutions Inc., which has a big operation in Irvine.
Rockwell’s long history made the area a “mecca of innovation,” according to
Gil Amelio, chief executive of Jazz Technologies Inc. who once ran the Rockwell chip plant.
“Those are the earliest days of OC technology,” he said. “They created an infrastructure of technology people because neat research draws talent. Collins served as a magnet for people who wanted to live here and practice technology.”
The aerospace in-dustry created the bones here for communications technology businesses, including chipmaker Broadcom, whose founders designed super fast chips for the Pentagon at TRW earlier in their careers.
Founders Henry Nicholas and Henry Samueli met back in the 1980s when they both did stints at TRW. The two founded communications chipmaker Broadcom in 1991.
After aerospace came the rise of the personal computer in the 1980s and 1990s, which had a big influence on the local tech industry.
“As the whole PC world developed, you had capabilities that either were here or could be developed here for things like disk drives and semiconductors, memory and certainly a lot of the hardware technology for the Internet,” said Donald Beall, former longtime Rockwell International chief
executive who retired in 1998.
Software companies also found a home here.
FileNet Corp., which was bought by IBM Corp. for $1.5 billion a few years ago, is one of the area’s oldest software companies.
It got its start in 1982 by computer industry veteran Ted Smith.
FileNet laid the groundwork for other makers of business software to move in, including Aliso Viejo’s Quest Software
Inc., Irvine’s Epicor Software Corp. and Sage Software Inc., the Irvine-based U.S. headquarters of Britain’s Sage Group PLC.
Other software biggies include a slew of video game developers, such as Irvine’s Blizzard Entertainment Inc., part of Vivendi SA, Irvine’s K2 Network Inc. and South Korea’s NHN Corp., which moved its U.S. headquarters to Irvine this year.
And a handful of data storage industry companies were born in OC as the digitization of information took hold.
Western Digital, the Lake Forest-based disk drive maker, didn’t start out in the storage business.
The company, founded in Irvine in 1970, used to be the biggest mak-er of calculator chips. In the 1980s, the company moved to PCs and made controller chips for floppy and hard disk drives.
In 1988, the company bought Chats-worth-based Tandon Corp. for its disk drive business and stopped making chips altogether.
Western Digital’s past executives went on to work at other storage companies, including Aliso Viejo-based QLogic and Costa Mesa’s Emulex Corp., which became big players within the sector.
The two companies have close ties: Emulex spun off QLogic in the early 1990s. These days they’re rivals in host bus adapters for data storage networks.
Companies here evolved in fits and starts and followed the booms and busts of the market.
“The way technology evolves is not in a nice, straight line,” Jazz’s Amelio said. “There’s a period of chaos and then pretty soon, we get our arms around the issues and we have a period of great growth,until we hit the next bottom period in the cycle.”
Amelio contends that from every downward dip in the market, new technologies emerge in the “chaotic period” that follows.
“The aerospace industry gave birth to communications technologies and the meltdown of the dot-com bubble saw the emergence of new convergent technologies that we had never had before,” Amelio said. “Something new always steps onto the scene.”
