> which were opened for the system/360 project

The East Fishkill, NY plant was specially built to manufacture
Solid Logic Technology (SLT) modules for the System/360. At the
time, this plant was considered "highly automated."  I am not
aware of any plants in the U.S. that were specifically built to
make either System/360 processors themselves, nor any of the
(mostly new) major peripherals used with them (initially, at
least). IBM did announce plans for new plants in Raleigh, North
Carolina and Boulder, Colorado. The Bolder plant was supposed
to handle (some) tape drive and (final) memory manufacturing,
but problems there ditched memory final assembly activities,
so Boulder (then) became a tape plant. Memory manufacturing
was moved (literally) to vendors in Japan and Taiwan who would
find homeworkers to thread wire core planes by hand. This then
enabled Kingston to concentrate on final assembly and it did
not have to expand. The RTP plant went on to become the home
of the 270x boxes, from whence BTAM and TCAM arose, and then
we got the 370x and SNA and VTAM (much later). What actually
happened for the most part is that existing plants expanded
their capacity during the timeframe of initial System/360 
deliveries, with the exception of Fishkill, Boulder, and RTP 
(NC). After that initial push, of course, plant _capacity_ 
did explode, but no complete plants specifically for S/360 
processors came along [to my knowledge.]

--
WB
 

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