Medios Magnéticos San Luis

Story of a leap that could not be

Abstract

In the 1980s, the Argentine company Medios Magneticos San Luis began manufacturing 5.25'' diskettes. To set up the plant in the industrial park of San Luis city, in 1987 they hired the engineer Roberto Jury, who then held the position of General Secretary of the National University of San Luis. In its early years, Medios Magneticos manufactured audio magnetic tapes and large chains such as Musimundo marketed the company's blank cassette, which had received a strong boost with industrial promotion policies during the government of Raúl Alfonsín. The assembly of the plant to start producing diskettes would suffer significant setbacks due to the lack of adequate advice. Once the company was at last able to launch its product on the market, the configuration of a new political-economic context led to stopping production. In this brief communication, part of the history of Medios Magneticos San Luis is reconstructed through the lens of Roberto Jury, who enthusiastically agreed to recount that initiative whose shipwreck adds a new picture to the album of the history of computing in Argentina: a rich album, after the recovery of democracy, both in academic projects for the development of information technology and for the development of the electronic-informatics complex.