Creating the Tools for Storing and Retrieving Digitized Information
EMC Corporation


From its early days, EMC has focused its engineering skills on developing better tools for preserving and managing digitized information. Dick Egan and Roger Marino, two seasoned executives (and friends since their 1961 graduation from Northeastern University's engineering school) founded EMC in 1979. They had no business plan or products, just a strong desire to run their own company and provide information technology users with better solutions to their needs.

At first, they sold Intel's memory products to customers in the fast-growing minicomputer industry throughout New England. In doing so, they uncovered a widespread dissatisfaction with the minicomputer vendors who forced these customers to buy all of the minicomputers' components, including add-on memory, from only one supplier. When they hit upon the idea for developing a better memory at a cheaper price, Dick and Roger spent weekends over the next five months designing and testing- on a computer loaned to them by one of their customers at the University of Rhode Island-their first product, a memory module that plugged into Prime computers.

From then on, success came from providing a similar solution to other types of minicomputers and later expanding into larger and more complicated disk-based storage systems for mainframe computers.

The focus on fast and reliable access to information led EMC to re-think computer storage in the early 1990s. With successive waves of computer storage hardware and software products, EMC went on to create a fast-growing segment of the information technology industry.