City has roads named Tape Drive and Disk Drive from bygone HDD-making era — area was once home to the StorageTek empire

Some U.S. towns and cities have roads that have been given names that are clearly technology-related. Redditor MorgothTheBauglir is the latest to surface this fact, recalling their recent surprise of exploring their new neighborhood and happening upon two intersecting roads: Tape Drive and Disk Drive. These are in the Louisville/Broomfield area, north of Denver, Colorado. But, as you will read below, they aren’t the only computer tech-related street names, even in Colorado.

The reason for the existence of these two particular roads is now lost in time. According to the Redditor’s tale, the roads are “in the middle of a dirt field like forgotten monuments to the golden age of physical backups.” A bit of Google Maps exploring shows they do indeed look rather neglected. However, they were created when Storage Technology Corporation (better known as StorageTek or STK) used to maintain a 400-acre campus there, with thousands of employees, and it was so expansive that it had its own road network.

Formed in 1969 by a quartet of ex-IBM engineers, STK thrived off the back of its enterprise storage business. It was bought by Sun Microsystems in 2005 for a considerable outlay ($4.1bn), but its operations and employees were integrated into another Sun Micro location. A company called ConocoPhillips would eventually buy up and demolish the STK facilities for redevelopment into a renewable energy facility. That didn’t materialize, though, and the space has been left unused.

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Now, 15 years since STK was scrubbed from the landscape, there are plans to redevelop the site into a substantial life sciences and biotech park called Redtail Ridge, notes MorgothTheBauglir.

These aren’t the only computer tech-related street names in the area. Googling reveals that there is also a Data Drive, which was used for one of the ex-campus roads, as well as a Memory Lane and an Infinite Loop in Louisville. Yes, that’s Infinite Loop, like the Apple HQ address in California.

Other nearby places with tech-related names include: Laser Drive, Solar Drive, and Network Place.

Computer programming-influenced street names in the UK

It was interesting to read about the above streets in the U.S., so I wondered if there were any similar streets in the UK. The best cluster of tech street names I could find was in an industrial estate in Cardiff, Wales. This business area features three computer-programming-infused avenues: Fortran Road, Pascal Close, and Cobol Road.

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