High tech: How federal government helped birth Austin industry along with other essentials

Yahoo

03-03-2025

Austin's owes the origins of its vaunted high-tech industry to the federal government.
At the close of World War II, the feds closed a bustling plant north of Austin that had processed magnesium used in explosives by the military.
Engineers at the University of Texas lobbied the federal government to release the sprawling complex — north of what is now Research Boulevard, south of what is now the Domain — so that it could be used as a site for fresh scientific research.
Thus was born the Balcones Research Center, later renamed the Pickle Research Center, after U.S. Rep. J.J. "Jake" Pickle, who followed Lyndon Baines Johnson and Homer Thornberry as congressional representatives for Austin and for the research hub located up on the former wooded prairie.
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Associated with this center were new, indigenous tech firms such as Tracor and National Instruments. In the 1960s and '70s, they were joined in Austin by IBM, Texas Instruments and Motorola, among others. Research collaborations and academic launchpads such as UT's IC² Institute, Microelectronics and Computer Consortium (MCC) and Sematech followed, along with home-grown tech home runs like Dell.
Today, descendants of these Austin projects stand alongside AMD, Samsung, Oracle, Apple, Meta, Google, Intel, Amazon, Silicon Labs, Microsoft, Tesla, SpaceX and other giants in the field. The support of locally based investors, such as Austin Ventures, has encouraged entrepreneurs to found countless additional tech startups.
In turn, the rush of tech-related money, ideas and leadership has changed the face of Austin culture. That includes its philanthropic, educational, culinary, retail, arts, design, moviemaking, festival and music scenes.
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Not all the newcomers have expressed an interest in the community's past or its future. Yet those who have, following the mentorship of enlightened pioneers such as UT's George and Ronya Kozmetsky, have enriched our city immeasurably.
And let's not forget other gifts from the feds and what else they contributed to the shape of Austin and Texas.
1840s: The U.S. annexed the Republic of Texas on generous terms, which included the eventual payment of the young country's considerable debt and a provision letting Texas keep its public lands, which benefited the new state's public schools, universities and construction of the majestic Texas Capitol, among other big projects.
1840s-1920s: The U.S. ensured the protection of the state's citizens against Mexico, which did not easily accept the loss of so much of its territory, and against the Native Americans who actually controlled most of that territory in the mid-19th century. The U.S. had ended Native American rule by the 1870s, and while formal peace was made with Mexico in 1848, combatants crossed back and forth across the Rio Grande well into the 1920s.
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1930s: While the Texas economy — dependent on cotton and newly discovered oil — thrived during the go-go 1920s, the Great Depression, along with the Dust Bowl, crippled most of the state in the 1930s. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal came to the rescue. In Austin, not only were many impoverished residents helped by programs such as direct relief and Social Security, as well as work programs like the WPA, CCC and NYA, the feds paid for local projects such as the UT Tower, numerous buildings, bridges and, perhaps most importantly, the dams along the Colorado River that offered essential flood protection along with electricity, water and recreation.
1940s: Austin and Texas were transformed forever by World War II. As in World War I, military bases proliferated, shipbuilding increased, and armament factories popped up all over the state. Families poured into the booming cities, and by 1950, Texas had become, for the first time, a state with a predominately urban population. Perhaps only California, with its Pacific Ocean ports and gargantuan defense industries, was altered more significantly.
1950s-2010s: Major Texas highways, airports, medical centers and research universities all depended on federal dollars. Fort Worth's defense plants, Dallas' financial enterprises, Houston oil and chemical industries, San Antonio, Corpus Christi and El Paso's military bases, Austin's university and tech sector — all of them required federal investment and federally funded infrastructure.
1990s: I'll add one last element that ties these together: Among the first federal efforts was to secure Texas militarily. That goal rarely wavered over the following decades. Among the major installations in Austin was the Del Valle Army Air Base, later renamed Bergstrom Air Force Base, after a native son who was an early casualty of World War II. In the 1990s, the feds turned the base over to the city of Austin to make way for what is now Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, an essential if overworked component of the city's success story.
Texans like to think of themselves as self-sufficient individualists, but, as this stroll through the American-Statesman archives demonstrates, we've had a little help along the way.
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: High tech is not the only Austin component aided by federal help