High-tech's march on Colorado: industry a boom and buffer to economy.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: Hightech Coloradobiz

THIRTY YEARS AGO, COLORADO HAD MORE IN COMMON WITH WEST TEXAS THAN IT DID WITH SILICON VALLEY.

Agricultural reports led off KOA's morning business broadcast. Computer programming jobs were few and far between, and those few that were available were jobs with large companies or the government. When this magazine published its first issue, mining, water and energy issues dominated its pages.

Technology, back then, as it related to business, was ultra-specialized and ultra-expensive, and it garnered only a fraction of the media's coverage. But the foundation for Colorado's modern high-tech economy was already in place.

Federal labs in Boulder and military and space installations in Colorado Springs were both products of the 1950s. Colorado's remote, mid-continent location made it a defense hub, in turn luring contractors like Martin Marietta and Ball Aerospace.

By 1960, when Hewlett-Packard chose Loveland as the site of its first manufacturing facility outside of California, the high-tech ball had slowly started to roll.

Late developer George M. Wallace helped speed things along by transforming 40 acres of pasture into the Denver Technological Center, beginning in 1962, as did the maturation of the University of Colorado as a research center for space technology and other leading-edge subjects.

IBM followed H-P to the Centennial State in 1965, opening its manufacturing plant and R&D labs near Boulder. Within six months, IBM Boulder was swamped with 10,000 applications and requests for transfer to the new facility. Programmers and engineers started arriving on a daily basis, not unlike the newcomers who came in search of gold and silver a century earlier. It also became apparent then that recruiting high-tech talent to Colorado would not be a problem.

Thanks to its diverse mix of national companies and federal entities, the state's high-tech labor pool got deeper and deeper. In 1969, four engineers left IBM and founded a data-storage startup that would make an indelible mark on the state's emerging tech landscape as its first and foremost homegrown hero.

That company -- StorageTechnology Corp. -- ultimately made Boulder County a capital for the storage industry, spawning dozens of other startups in the process.

In ColoradoBiz's 30-year lifespan, companies have come and gone, technologies have materialized and become obsolete, and innovation has surpassed our wildest dreams. Decade by decade, the only constant has been change.

THOSE GO-GO 1970S

The disco decade saw more than 100 high-tech manufacturing companies commence operations in Colorado, as banking, insurance, health care and other old-guard industries welcomed information technology with open arms. IBM, H-P and numerous now-defunct hardware suppliers saw sales boom.

After Jesse Aweida, Zoltan Herger, Juan Rodriguez and Tom Kavanagh left IBM and struck out on their own in 1969, the four launched the company now known as StorageTek from an office above Boulder's Aristocrat Steak House on Pearl Street (now the home of The Gap). The company's early growth curve was impressively steep, and it quickly captured the leading market share in the tape storage market - a position it holds even to this day.

In the early 1970s, Aweida and company had modest goals: to capitalize on the demand for high-performance data storage products, and capture a small chunk of IBM's business in the process. Did Aweida ever fancy...