Ampex

Ampex is a company, originally founded in late 1944 to build precision electric motors for use in radar units, which shortly after WWII diverged into building magnetic tape drives; it is considered to be one of the early Silicon Valley entities.

Further reading

• Timothy J. Sturgeon, How Silicon Valley Came to Be, Chapter 1 in Understanding Silicon Valley: Anatomy of an Entrepreneurial Region, Stanford University, 2000 (archived here) - includes coverage of the evolution of Ampex, starting in WWII