Company Pedigree
| Ascendant Companies | Descendent Companies | ||
| Company | Comments | Company | Comments |
| Motorola | Founded by former Motorola employee, Alvin Phillips. Western Digital was originally called General Digital Corporation. | ||
| Tandon Corporation | Bought Tandon’s disk drive division in 1988. | ||
Company Overview
Western Digital Corporation was founded in 1970. Today, Western Digital is best known for its disk drives, however Western Digital didn’t started making disk drives until 1988. In the mid-70’s, Western Digital was the largest independent producer of calculator chips. In the 1980’s Western Digital focus moved to PC’s and developed controllers for floppy and hard disk drives. In, 1988 with the purchase of Tandon’s disk drives, Western Digital’s focused on supplying the PC industry with disk drives.
Major Achievements
Key Architects of IDE and EIDE standards
1st floppy disk controller, 1976
1st single-chip Winchester disk drive controller, 1982
1st Winchester disk controller board for IBM PC/AT, 1984
1st two-platter, 3.5-inch, 340-megabyte drive, 1993
1st 3.5-inch, 1-gigabyte, 3-platter Enhanced IDE drive, 1994
1st 1.6-gigabyte EIDE drive, 1995
Chip Identification
Western Digital Chips
| Microprocessors | |
| CPU’s | MP/MCP1600, CP9008 (16-bit, 1Q79) |
| MCU’s | WD40 (CR2872) (4-bit,3Q77) |
| Bit-Slice | |