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Corporate marriages are not always happy, but they often produce remarkable offspring. One of the highway's first companies was Bomac Laboratories, Inc., which grew out of an engineering group at Sylvania and produced microwave tubes and devices (1958 sales: $10 million). When Bomac merged with Varian Associates this year, six key employees were piqued because they got less than 1% of the swapped stock; in April they stalked off with four others to form Metco (Microwave Electronic Tube Co.) and compete with their former employer. Within nine days they had a plant in Salem, Mass., financing, firm contracts and a production schedule calling for June deliveries of microwave tubes. "Within a year," predicts Founder Richard Broderick, former Bomac treasurer, "we'll have 100 employees. And in three years, we'll be back on the highway."
Buying the Future. How long can 128's whiz kids keep up their phenomenal growth? The companies are heavily dependent on Government contracts, which can be cut back or canceled overnight. Their products often can be copied by competitors. Their financing can fall through if the stratospheric stock market ever tumbles or credit tightens. Their space-age industries can run into rugged shake-outs—just as most other industries have in the past. This means that only those with the wisest managers, the sharpest scientists and the biggest bankrolls will come through. Even for those, the prices of the stocks are so high that investors are, in effect, paying on the basis of what a company will earn years hence.
Despite these potholes in the road, the bold adventurers on 128 say that the period of biggest growth is ahead. So many research-based companies were being formed around Boston last week that plans were afoot to build another highway, swinging out beyond 128, to accommodate them. The believers in the Space Highway hold that when the climate produces ideas, growth is sure to follow.
* Another: the San Francisco peninsula around Stanford University at Palo Alto.