Sunday, September 24, 2006

Cluster analysis | Blame it on the typewriter | Economist.com

Cluster analysis | Blame it on the typewriter | Economist.com:

"HAD it not been for the humble typewriter, Austin might have been all politics and football, and no venture capital. In 1967 IBM opened a plant in the city to make Selectric typewriters. It then moved on to mainframe circuit-boards and terminals and eventually to personal computers. Other technology outfits sprung up in IBM's shadow. Texas Instruments (TI) arrived in 1969 and Sematech and MCC, two industry research consortia, during the 1980s. Michael Dell founded his PC-making firm in 1984 while a student at the University of Texas at Austin. Over 2,000 other technology firms set up shop in Austin during the 1990s.

Today “Silicon Hills” is a huge hub for the semiconductor industry. Besides Freescale and TI, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) designs chips in Austin and Spansion, its recent spin-off, manufactures flash-memory cards. Samsung, the South Korean electronics giant, has recently broken ground to build the largest semiconductor factory in America. The plant, Samsung's second facility in Austin, will cost $3.5 billion."

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