Products
The various Rockwell companies list a large number of firsts in their histories, including the World War II P-51 Mustang fighter and the B-25 Mitchell bomber, and the Korean War-era F-86 Sabre, as well as the Apollo spacecraft, the B-1 Lancer bomber, the Space Shuttle, and most of the Navstar Global Positioning System satellites.
Rocketdyne, which had been spun off by North American in 1955, was re-merged into Rockwell in 1984, and by that time produced most of the rocket engines used in the United States. Rockwell also purchased the Aero Design and Engineering Company from William and Rufus Travis Amis. Rockwell redesigned the company's Aero Commander aircraft, introducing its new design as the Rockwell Commander 112 and Commander 114.
The company developed a desktop calculator based on a MOSFET chip for use by its engineers. In 1967 Rockwell set up its own manufacturing plant to produce them, starting what would become Rockwell Semiconductor. One of its major successes came in the early 1990s when it introduced the first low-cost 14.4 kbit/s modem chip set, which was used in a huge number of modems.
Collins radios were fitted to 80% of the Free World's airliners. Collins designed and built the radios that communicated the Apollo Moon landings and the high frequency radio network that allows worldwide communication with US military aircraft. Rockwell designed and built the third stage of the Minuteman Intercontinental ballistic missile, (ICBM) and the AIRS inertial guidance system (INS) that provided its navigation. It also built inertial navigation systems for the Fleet of Ballistic Missile submarines.
Rockwell built heavy-duty truck axles and drive-trains in the U.S. along with power windows, seats and locks. Rockwell also built yachts and business jets and owned large amounts of real estate.
It was also involved in providing custom ELINT equipment to the Imperial Iranian Air Force as part of Project Ibex and paid bribes to the Shah of Iran in order to secure contracts there.
Read more about this topic: Rockwell International
Famous quotes containing the word products:
“Isn’t it odd that networks accept billions of dollars from advertisers to teach people to use products and then proclaim that children aren’t learning about violence from their steady diet of it on television!”
—Toni Liebman (20th century)
“We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship.”
—George Wald (b. 1906)
“The reality is that zero defects in products plus zero pollution plus zero risk on the job is equivalent to maximum growth of government plus zero economic growth plus runaway inflation.”
—Dixie Lee Ray (b. 1924)