Memories - EMC to be acquired by Dell

Today's announcement that EMC will be acquired by Dell in a $67 million deal is notable for many reasons. It's the biggest tech merger ever, and the largest deal of all time where a private company (Dell) will be taking a public company ($EMC) private.

But it also teases out some pretty ancient memories for me, and coincidentally I will mention my first job at HP for the second post in a row! (See "Revisiting Splitsville"). A check at Wikipedia reveals EMC was founded in 1979 as a provider of third-party disk storage for Prime Computer. But as they branched out, the Disk Memory Division (DMD) of HP became very aware of them, as a "parasitic" supplier of disk storage for HP minicomputers. As a captive supplier of disk storage ourselves, DMD was in a generally excellent business position and was for a time the HP division with the largest revenue of them all - more than that of even the minicomputer divisions we supplied. But following IBM's lead and their approach to third-party suppliers of disk storage, we saw it as a scourge that needed to fought off aggressively.

That was about 30 years ago, and it is amazing to think that EMC has had such a prosperous history since!