Anti-trust and emission limits as Cupid

There's two reasons that IBM was cloning San Jose's HDD technology in Rochester, MN:

1) IBM had real fears that the results of the long Federal IBM anti-trust investigation would result in splitting up IBM so the disk drive capability needed to be in Roch's mid-size systems division.

2) California was starting to crack down on factory emissions and IBM San Jose's emissions from the disk drive manufacturing was nearing the emissions limit. So an additional disk drive location was required to increase capacity.

Of course, thirty years ago today, Geoff and I were totally unaware that anti-trust and environmental laws would play cupid in our lives in the coming weeks.

Here's a good article about the 13 year antitrust suit in the context of Microsoft and AT&T.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/longterm/microsoft/stories/microtale19.htm