UPDATE: Quiz: What’s Oldest Acquisition in History of Storage Industry?

We got an update of our article Quiz: What’s Oldest Acquisition in History of Storage Industry? from Tom Gardner, the best known source of the history of tape media, tape drives, HDDs and RAID systems.

He is treasurer and webmaster of the IEEE Silicon Valley History Committee (chair by Tom Coughlin). Among its former positions, the storage veteran now based in Silicon Valley, CA, was at Memorex (1968-1982), Shugart (1982-1985) and SyQuest (1991-1996).

Here are his corrections:

• In tape media, Orradio Industries acquired by Ampex which became the Ampex Magnetic Tape Division, headquartered in Opelika, AL, in 1955 (1959 for Wikipedia). This deal becomes the oldest acquisition historically in the WW storage industry.
• In tape drives, Midwest Instruments was acquired by Telex in 1962.
• In HDDs, Century Data was acquired by CalComp in 1969.
• In September 1970, Honeywell Information Systems formed by merger of Honeywell’s computed and communications group with GE business computer operations. It included storage devices and subsystems.

Total number of M&A in the storage industry now climbs at 1,635 from 1955 up to now.