IBM Rochester is the facility of IBM in Rochester, Minnesota. The initial structure was designed by

Eero Saarinen Eero Saarinen (, ; August 20, 1910 – September 1, 1961) was a Finnish-American architect and industrial designer noted for his wide-ranging array of designs for buildings and monuments. Saarinen is best known for designing the General Motors ...

, who clad the structure in

blue Blue is one of the three primary colours in the RYB colour model (traditional colour theory), as well as in the RGB (additive) colour model. It lies between violet and cyan on the spectrum of visible light. The eye perceives blue when ...

panels of varying hues after being inspired by the

Minnesota Minnesota () is a state in the upper midwestern region of the United States. It is the 12th largest U.S. state in area and the 22nd most populous, with over 5.75 million residents. Minnesota is home to western prairies, now given over to ...

sky, as well as IBM's nickname of " Big Blue". These features and the facility's size has earned it the nickname "The Big Blue Zoo" from employees.

History

Early years

Groundbreaking Groundbreaking, also known as cutting, sod-cutting, turning the first sod, or a sod-turning ceremony, is a traditional ceremony in many cultures that celebrates the first day of construction for a building or other project. Such ceremonies are ...

for the facility took place on July 31, 1956. When it was first completed, there was 576,000 square feet (53,500 m²) of floor space. There is 3.1 million square feet (290,000 m²) today 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. It was constructed on an accelerated schedule during World War II. As a symbol of the U.S. military, the phrase ''The Pentagon'' is often used as a meton ...

Arlington, Virginia Arlington County is a county in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The county is situated in Northern Virginia on the southwestern bank of the Potomac River directly across from the District of Columbia, of which it was once a part. The county ...

. Rumors have appeared over the years suggesting that the structure was designed to look like a

punched card A punched card (also punch card or punched-card) is a piece of stiff paper that holds digital data represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions. Punched cards were once common in data processing applications or to di ...

from above, but this is more due to the facility's expansion over the years rather than an intention by Saarinen. 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 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 d ...

. 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 name of the site would be changed to the ''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, continues at Rochester.

IBM Power Systems Power Systems is a family of server computers from IBM that are based on its Power processors. It was created in 2008 as a merger of the System p and System i product lines. History IBM had two distinct POWER- and PowerPC-based hardware l ...

development is still done at this site.

PureSystems PureSystems is an IBM product line of factory pre-configured components and servers also being referred to as an "Expert Integrated System". The centrepiece of PureSystems is the ''IBM Flex System Manager'' in tandem with the so-called "Patterns ...

were originally assembled at this site, but are now mainly assembled in New York and Mexico. The

IBM 3740 IBM 3740 Data Entry System was a data entry system that was announced by IBM in 1973. It recorded data on an 8" diskette, a new recording medium from IBM, for fast, flexible, efficient data entry to either high-production, centralized operations ...

Data Entry System was developed at the facility in 1973 and the follow-on

IBM 5280 The IBM 5280 was designed to compete with the data entry products that were available at the time. The IBM 3740 was the major data entry capability available to convert the data collected at the source, whether high volume, distributed or locally g ...

Distributed Data System had its beginnings there as well, 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 played an important in the Summit and Sierra supercomputers.

RS/6000 The RISC System/6000 (RS/6000) is a family of Reduced instruction set computer, RISC-based Unix Server (computing), servers, workstations and supercomputers made by IBM in the 1990s. The RS/6000 family replaced the IBM RT PC computer platform in ...

, now System p, and hard disk development also occurred at this site in the past.

Distinctions

The

AS/400 The IBM AS/400 (Application System/400) is a family of midrange computers from IBM announced in June 1988 and released in August 1988. It was the successor to the System/36 and System/38 platforms, and ran the OS/400 operating system. Lower-cos ...

division at the plant received the

Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award recognizes U.S. organizations in the business, health care, education, and nonprofit sectors for performance excellence. The Baldrige Award is the highest formal recognition of the performance excellen ...

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 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 updates always coinci ...

list of fast supercomputers with a prototype

Blue Gene/L Blue Gene is an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) range, with low power consumption. The project created three generations of supercomputers, Blue Gene/L, Blue Gene/P, ...

system containing 32,768

processor Processor may refer to: Computing Hardware * Processor (computing) **Central processing unit (CPU), the hardware within a computer that executes a program *** Microprocessor, a central processing unit contained on a single integrated circuit (I ...

s. It clocked in at 70.72

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

s. The manufacturing output of the site is so great that if it were 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 (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...

, along with IBM's

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

headquarters and the IBM

building A building, or edifice, is an enclosed structure with a roof and walls standing more or less permanently in one place, such as a house or factory (although there's also portable buildings). Buildings come in a variety of sizes, shapes, and fu ...

Atlanta, Georgia Atlanta ( ) is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Georgia. It is the seat of Fulton County, the most populous county in Georgia, but its territory falls in both Fulton and DeKalb counties. With a population of 498,7 ...

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 d ...

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

*(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 Documentary research is the use of outside sources, documents, to support the viewpoint or argument of an academic work. The process of documentary research Research is " creative and systematic work undertaken to increase the stock of ...

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