ESL Incorporated

Early formation and progression

The company was founded from a small incubator space on Fabian Way in Palo Alto, California, where it remained until about 85 employees in size. The first major expansion took place about 1969, when a staged facility complex in Sunnyvale, California on Java Drive was initiated. within Moffett Industrial Park, which yielded a decade later about 400,000 square feet (37,000 m2) of space for laboratories and research/development activity. The early line management team included Perry as chief executive; Robert Fossum (later director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), director of systems analysis; Donald Wolfe, director of hardware; Michael Hogan, director of environmental systems and Paul Scheibe, director of technology. By 1988 there were 9 buildings housing the over 3000 employees.

1988 mass shooting

In February 1988, former employee Richard Farley fatally shot seven people and wounded four others at the company's headquarters after years of stalking former co-worker Laura Black. The incident helped prompt California's 1990 passage of the country's first anti-stalking laws.

The company developed the first software for interpreting renal isograms in the diagnosis of Renovascular hypertension, working in conjunction with physicians practicing in the kidney disease diagnostics field. For NASA, image processing research has been used to interpret satellite photos, including some of the earliest work of this type. The environmental systems division has developed specialized mathematical models for air quality, environmental noise and water pollution topics, gaining note for developing early line source models used in certain environmental litigation.

Public offering and merger with TRW

The company underwent a successful public offering of its common stock underwritten by Hambrecht & Quist in the mid-1970s with shares thereafter trading on the NASDAQ exchange. In 1978 a merger was consummated with TRW Inc. to merge ESL with TRW, the latter being a large defense contractor in the USA. In 2001, TRW sold the real estate of the ESL campus in Sunnyvale, CA. Approximately half of the operation moved to San Jose, California, and the other half set up offices at the former McClellan Air Force Base in Sacramento, California.

Acquisition of TRW by Northrop Grumman Corporation

In December 2002, TRW and its subsidiary, ESL were acquired by Northrop Grumman Corporation. Northrop Grumman has one of the largest intelligence analysis capabilities in the U.S. and is a leader in developing computer architectures and multi-source data integration tools. Core competencies of the combined ESL, TRW, and Northrop Grumman units include systems integration, high-performance signal processing algorithms, high-speed architectures, remotely controlled modular payloads and antenna systems. ESL survives essentially intact in their San Jose facility and the former McClellan Air Force Base facility in Sacramento.