In the scrubland north of Denver, two roads intersect with little fanfare or traffic. Their names, however, carry the weight of a vanished era: Tape Drive and Disk Drive. These are in the Louisville/Broomfield area, north of Denver, Colorado.
According to observers, the roads sit "in the middle of a dirt field like forgotten monuments to the golden age of physical backups," looking rather neglected. Yet their existence is no accident. They were created when Storage Technology Corporation, better known as StorageTek or STK, used to maintain a 400-acre campus there, with thousands of employees, and it was so expansive that it had its own road network.
StorageTek's story mirrors the broader trajectory of technology industry booms and consolidations. Formed in 1969 by a quartet of ex-IBM engineers, STK thrived off the back of its enterprise storage business. The headquarters was in Louisville, Boulder County, Colorado. The company enjoyed remarkable success through the 1970s and 1980s, building cutting-edge data storage systems for the mainframe computing world.
Like many ambitious technology ventures, StorageTek's trajectory included setbacks. After a failed attempt to develop an IBM-compatible mainframe and an optical disk product line, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 1984. Starting in 1987, new management invested in an automated tape library product line that "picked" tapes from a silo-like contraption with a robot arm. This pivot proved successful, and the company recovered.
By the early 2000s, however, industry consolidation caught up with StorageTek. In June 2005, Sun Microsystems announced it would purchase StorageTek for US$4.1 billion in cash, or $37.00 per share. In August 2005, the acquisition was completed. Sun shifted employees to their Broomfield, CO, campus and subsequently vacated the Louisville campus circa 2007.
The road names Tape Drive and Disk Drive remain, anachronistic tributes to a company that once dominated its corner of the tech industry. Today they lead to empty fields and sparse development, serving as quiet reminders of Colorado's once-thriving storage technology sector. The company itself lives on in a different form; its remaining product line is now part of Oracle Corporation, and marketed as Oracle StorageTek, with a focus on tape backup equipment and software to manage storage systems.