Quote:
Originally Posted by texboy
...Think Austin in the late 80's early 90's. Tech is starting to take notice of SA due to its lower cost of living and good proximity to Austin, but I think we are still a decade or more away from seeing the tech industry really grasp the idea of SA. Also, within the Tech realm, Austin really owes a ton of its growth to one company... Dell. Dell is THE reason IMHO that Austin boomed. Dell got big, other companies moved in to supply Dell and then other companies started piling in to get first dibs on UT graduates with Comp Science degrees. It really was a perfect "storm" per se, where as SA doesn't really have a "Dell".
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SA does not have an engine driver like the University of Texas (and some 140,000-150,000 additional college students in the metro area). And, thus, tech will never be anywhere as big as it is in Austin. Furthermore, the tech industry took hold in Austin LONG before Dell really began to grow and took it's place as one of the world's largest computer manufacturers in the early 1990's. In fact, MCC and SEMATECH are widely given credit to beginning Austin's "current" tech boom (in the early-to-mid 1980's).
Austin's tech history dates back to the 1950's and 1960's when Tracor, IBM and Texas Instruments established a large presence in the city.
Also, remember that Austin has doubled it's metro population every 20-25 years since its founding in 1839. So, tech is not the sole reason for the city's growth over time.
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