Rochester chronology

May 2
IBM United States announces that President George H. Bush has presented the President's Trophy, the country's highest honor for a person with a disability, to David A. Schwartzkopf, a program manager at IBM's facility in Rochester, Minn.

Jul.
The IBM Storage Systems Product Division is formed and becomes part of the Enterprise Systems line of business. The division is essentially a merger of the former General Products Division, which had been responsible for high-end storage products, with the low-end and intermediate storage products organization that had been part of the Application Business Systems line of business. Ray S. AbuZayyad is named president of the new division, with headquarters in Somers, N.Y. The division's activities in Rochester; Fujisawa, Japan; and Havant, U.K., were formerly in the Application Business Systems line of business.

Dec. 13
U.S. President George H. Bush presents Rochester with the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the highest award in the United States for quality.

 Rochester exports more than $501 million worth of computer hardware and electronic assemblies worldwide.
 

Sep.
Rochester begins shipping the industry's first 3.5-inch hard file with a capacity of one gigabyte (the equivalent of 500,000 pages of double-spaced text).

Oct.
The site encompasses 3.6 million square feet and employs about 8,100 people.

Dec.5
December 5 -- IBM establishes the Storage Products line of business to be responsible for the development and manufacture of IBM's disk, tape and optical storage products and related software. IBM vice president Ray S. AbuZayyad is named general manager, with headquarters in San Jose, Calif. The new organization is created from the former IBM Storage Systems Products Division, which had been part of the Enterprise Systems line of business. Storage products are developed in San Jose; Rochester; Tucson, Ariz.; Havant, England; and Fujisawa, Japan. Manufacturing is performed in San Jose, Rochester, Havant and Fujisawa, as well as in Mainz and Berlin, Germany; and Martinez, Argentina. The new global organization has approximately 18,500 employees at its formation.

Dec. 31
The Rochester site is responsible for midrange computer systems, low-end storage products and software.

  IBM's Storage Products business is renamed ADSTAR, and Rochester becomes one of ADSTAR's 11 sites in eight countries.

Dec. 17
IBM announces that its award-winning Rochester development and manufacturing site has met the ISO 9000 standard for quality assurance, making it one of the few recipients of both the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and the international quality registration.
 

Aug. The site is engaged in development and manufacturing of the IBM AS/400 family of systems and related programming; and the development and manufacturing of high-capacity, small form factor direct access storage devices.

Aug.
There are approximately 7,600 employees on site from Application Business Systems, ADSTAR, Marketing and Services, Skill Dynamics, Workforce Solutions and the IBM National Service Division.

Aug.
Robert M. Unterberger is the site general manager.

Sep.24
The company announces general availability of the IBM 7135 RAIDiant Array, which had been announced on July 13, 1993. The 7135 had been developed and tested at multiple IBM sites, with primary development in Havant, U.K. Havant was responsible for power and packaging and for integrating the software and hardware components. IBM's facilities in San Jose; Rochester; and Austin, Tex., also contributed to the development.

Oct. 6
IBM introduces the SystemView Information Warehouse DataHub family of software products. DataHub had been developed by IBM Programming Systems at the Santa Teresa Laboratory in San Jose, Calif., the IBM Canada Laboratory in Toronto; the Application Business Systems line of business in Rochester; and the IBM Australia/New Zealand Ltd. Australian Programming Centre in Sydney.
 

Oct. 9
The company rolls out the IBM AS/400 Advanced Entry system. The first such system -- and the 400,000th AS/400 shipped by IBM -- is presented that same day in Rochester to Greg LeMond, the three-time winner of the Tour de France bicycle race and a small business entrepreneur.
 

  IBM's Engineering & Technology Services organization maintains a group in Rochester .