Orlando FL Sentinel
Much of South Florida’s high-tech lineage can be traced to those heady days for IBM in Boca Raton
by Christine Winter
August 12th 2001
Twenty years ago, Boca Raton was the PC capital of the world, a title that faded when International Business Machines Corp. lost its hold on the market and moved its personal computer operations to North Carolina and Texas in the mid-1990’s.
But for the engineers who worked on the PC and its subsequent upgrades, there was no better place to be than Boca Raton in the years surrounding its August 12, 1981 introduction.
Although other PC’s already were on the market in the early 1980’s, including Apple Computer’s Apple II, along with products from Commodore and Radio Shack, IBM’s boxy machine would change the world of computing.
“An entire industry was born there,” said Mark Dean, now an IBM research fellow in Yorktown, NY. Dean worked on the original project and headed up the effort to build the next generation, the PC AT, which was introduced in 1984.
But Boca Raton was not always a hot spot, even within IBM; for years it was considered a company backwater, full of products” that were initiated someplace else,” said Chet Heath, a 20 year veteran of the Boca division of IBM, who is now the chief technology officer of Omnicluster Inc., a start-up in Boca Raton.
“The PC put Boca on a par with all the other IBM labs, and its tremendous success, with 72 percent of the market at one point, finally gained it respect within the company,” he said.
The legacy of those heady days lives on in the many small technology companies in Boca Raton, as well as in the old IBM corporate center, now the T-Rex Technology Center.
“Today’s Internet Coast is not so much a result of IBM being here, but a result of the technology being here, and the spirit IBM fostered,” said John Hannifan, a retired IBM executive and former site general manager for IBM Boca. Today, Hannifan is a member of the board of directors of Cenetec, a high-technology accelerator.
Life after IBM
Citrix Systems Inc. of Fort Launderdale, founded by former IBMer Ed Lacobucci, is probably the largest and most successful company that grew out of big Blue’s presence in South Florida.
“The first 15 people at Ciitrix were hired out of IBM, ” recalled Rich Andersen, who worked on the IBM AT, and is now director of software development at Citrix. “They Brought a lot of skills and management processes with them.”
Other companies that were founded by former IBMers or had its engineers as part of their early management teams include Boca Research (now Inprimis), which designs digital devices for entertainment systems; the Panda Project, which became a technology holding company after selling its technology for building easily upgradeable PC’s; and start-up Omnicluster, which makes cards that expand the capabilities of servers.
Fond memories
Even those IBMers who left Boca Raton look back fondly on South Florida and the part it played in the development process of the machine that would go on to change the way the world works and plays.
Dave Bradley, one of the “original 12” engineers on the PC project, recalled a favorite lab joke.
The electromagnetic emissions, had to be measured to comply with new FCC rules for any device that would be used in the home, he said.
“But we had no test chambers in Boca to measure emissions without interference,” he added. “However, the FCC allowed open field testing.”
So IBM engineers packed their prototypes into a pickup and hauled them out to the fringes of the Everglades.
‘They went as far as they could go, and still be dry, to test the emissions so we could get approval,” Bradley said. “Ill never forget those guys straggling back into the lab at 4or d in the afternoon, smelling like sunscreen and insect repellent.”
Lofty decisions
Bradley also recalled, because of the lengthy flight from Bellevue, Washington, where Microsoft is headquartered, to Fort Lauderdale, many decisions were made in the air.
“The entire character set for the PC was determined on one of those flights”‘ he said.
Even Boca Raton Competitors benefited. Core International Inc., now owned by Aiwa Co.,grew dramatically after it started marketing its own disk drive as a replacement for a troublesome drive built into the PCAT.