Looking Back to 1999: EMC buys Data General
EVENT: Thirty-one years after its founding, Data General Corp. of Westborough was sold to Hopkinton-based EMC Corp. for a reported $1.1 billion.
RECAP: Michael Ruettgers, then the president and CEO of EMC, saw an opportunity to grow his company in buying Data General, which had helped advance the business computing paradigm from one based largely on mainframes to one based on minicomputers. But the shift to the personal computer and the Internet in the 1990s caused another seismic shift in the technology business. Yet, since Data General has also been a major supplier of computer storage systems and servers, the marriage with EMC made sense.
FAST FORWARD: There's hardly a trace of Data General today, except for former employees who now work for EMC, the second-largest employer in Central Massachusetts and No. 133 on the Fortune 500. In 2003, one of Data General's co-founders, Edson De Castro, told Fortune: "I'm not really convinced that 100 years from now anyone is going to have any record of its existence." n
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