StorageTek
Storage Technology Corporation – the company that made tape robots standard data-centre furniture.
Four IBM defectors led by Jesse Aweida founded it in Colorado in 1969, starting with tape drives that plugged into IBM mainframes and cost less than IBM's own. An ill-advised attempt to build its own mainframe ended in Chapter 11 in 1984, but the company survived.
What saved it was the automated tape library. The silo-shaped Powderhorn series, with a robot arm fetching cartridges from thousands of slots, sat for decades in every bank and agency that took its backups seriously. Sun bought StorageTek in 2005 for $4.1 billion, which is how the business ended up at Oracle in 2010.