Intel just announced that it would close the Hudson Manufacturing Facility it acquired from Digital Equipment Corp in 1997. The press release from Intel said “the Hudson plant has been used to make a variety of low-end chips found in many electronic devices.” The closure of this plant will not mean much to people other than the thousand or so people directly affected. The exception to this are the few pioneers who vision and drive created it in the first place. They dared to dreamed big and lost. While they understood the potential of semi-conductor technology and large scale integration, like all of us at that time, they did not understand that the computer industry was about to be turned sideway and that companies that were vertically integrated would fail like Digital would fail.
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