<p>It is the end of an era the minicomputer era to be precise for the IBMers who work in the company's sprawling Rochester, Minnesota facility. Their jobs are moving to Mexico.</p><p>Big Blue had a meeting with the approximately 2,800 employees in the facility on Monday afternoon and told them it would cease manufacturing operations at the facility, which was built in 1956 and which was expanded significantly over the decades to design and make processors, systems, disk drives, main memory, and various systems software aimed at SMB customers.</p><p>The move is yet another step in a long, slow slog toward irrelevancy for the storied facility in the Land of 10,000 Lakes.</p><p>IBM stopped making memory in the early 1990s. It sold off its UltraStar disk drive business to Hitachi long after moving most of their production overseas to Singapore, Thailand, and Poland (and having manufacturing issues it never had in Rochester). The AS/400 team created the first and only working 64-bit PowerPC processor after the Somerset partnership of Apple-Motorola-IBM failed from their Austin, Texas labs with the PowerPC 630. IBM moved Power processor development to Austin a long time ago, as well, but the 64-bit core and double-pumped floating point unit invented in Rochester lived on in every AS/400 and RS/6000 minicomputer and their follow-on systems based on the Power architecture, including BlueGene/Q.</p><p><a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/08/ibm_power_systems_manufacturing_mexico/">Keep reading...</a></p><p>Read also:</p><p><a href="http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2013/03/07/business/ibm-future-rochester">&#039;Stunned silence&#039; as IBM breaks news to Rochester employees</a> (Minnesota Public Radio)</p><p><a href="http://www.postbulletin.com/business/latest-ibm-job-losses-give-rochester-pause/article_5758af29-8137-5f3e-9d17-f3ad90d08d56.html">Latest IBM job losses give Rochester pause</a> (Post-Bulletin)</p><p><a href="http://www.bizjournals.com/twincities/morning_roundup/2013/03/ibms-rochester-pullout-how-big-a-blow.html">IBM&#039;s Rochester pullout: How big a blow?</a> (Minneapolis / St. Paul Business Journal (blog))</p><p>Explore: <a href="http://news.google.com/news/more?ncl=dDBmx53Sf8dU4NM74nNupw9YyLdrM&ned=us">26 additional articles.</a></p>