A little Qualcomm history: (excerpts from an article in today's SD Union)
Linkabit, a San Diego business that helped spawn some of the region's most-successful telecommunications companies,
plans to sell stock for the first time -- almost 30 years after it
was founded.
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In the genealogy of San Diego's Telecom Valley, more than 30 companies trace their roots to the glory days of Linkabit, which today specializes in satellite communications equipment.
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At a Linkabit 25th anniversary reunion held in 1993, former Linkabit employees used a chalkboard to chart their branching relationships in the Linkabit family tree. By the end of the party, 27 companies -- including Qualcomm, ViaSat and CommQuest -- had traced their lineage to Linkabit.
Founded as a consulting firm in 1968 by Irwin M. Jacobs and Andrew J. Viterbi, Linkabit quickly became renowned for its innovative development of new communications equipment.
"It was an engineering-driven company," recalled Martha G. Dennis, who joined Linkabit as a software engineer and rose quickly to assistant vice president of engineering. "It was a company that valued engineers. If you were a staff engineer, it meant you were a god."
But Linkabit's corporate culture began changing after it was acquired by M/A-Com Inc. of Burlington, Mass., in 1980. Jacobs, apparently frustrated by his dealings with his corporate superiors, left Linkabit in 1985. A few months later, he and Viterbi started Qualcomm.
"All of a sudden, a bunch of people were leaving to join Qualcomm, and everything else began to change," said Mark Dankberg, a former Linkabit engineer who quit the company in 1986 to start ViaSat Inc. in Carlsbad.
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... Since Linkabit's 25th reunion, Dennis said the number of spinoffs has increased beyond 30...
Pierre |
