Garmin C330 Facilitator Manual page 12

Personal Navigation System: Garmin C330
Appendix
Garmin Ltd. NASDAQ: GRMN, Taiwan-based Company, incorporated in George Town,
Cayman Islands, is a group of companies founded in 1989 by Gary Burrell, Min Kao, David
Casey and Paul Shumaker, that develops consumer and aviation technologies for the Global
Positioning System. Subsidiary Garmin International, Inc. serves as headquarters for the
Garmin Limited companies and is located in Olathe, Kansas, which is located in the Kansas City
Metropolitan Area. The largest operating subsidiary and primary production facility of Garmin
Limited is Garmin (Asia) Corporation located in Sijhih City, Taiwan, a suburb of Taipei.
Founders and Company Origins
Gary Burrell, born in 1937, earned a degree in Electrical Engineering from Wichita State
University and a graduate degree from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He went to work for
King Radio, a manufacturer of aviation radios in 1963 only six years after that company had
been started by Edward King Jr. in a farmhouse in Olathe, Kansas. A licensed pilot, Burrell led
development on some of King's most successful navigation and communications products. King
went on to supply Boeing with radio equipment starting in 1969.
By 1989 Burrell had spent nearly his entire professional career—with the exception of a brief
stint at Lowrance Electronics—working for King Radio. During these years the company went
through many corporate changes. In 1983 King was acquired by the Allied Corporation and
combined with the former Bendix Corporation to form Bendix-King. Allied later went on to
merge with the Signal Companies in 1993 to form AlliedSignal which acquired Honeywell in
1999 and then took its name.
Min H. Kao was born in 1949 in a small town in Taiwan called Chushang in Nantou After
serving in that country's navy he attended National Taiwan University and moved to the United
States of America to attend the University of Tennessee where he obtained advanced degrees in
Electrical Engineering. While a graduate student, he did research for the National Aeronautics
and Space Administration and the United States Army. He later went on to work for the
American defense contractors Teledyne and Magnavox.
Burrell hired Kao to join his division at Allied's King subsidiary in 1983. Kao had been working
at Magnavox developing military navigation systems using the Global Positioning System
constellation of satellites, which at the time was still known by the name NAVSTAR. During his
years working with Burrell, Kao led the team that developed the first GPS navigation system that
was to be certified for use in airplanes by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.
Burrell left Allied Corp. in 1989. Convinced that the company should have been more aggressive
in pursuing products based on GPS technology, he found management did not agree. He took to
interviewing for jobs at other companies including Magnavox, but couldn't find a good fit. A
deeply religious Christian, Burrell had been a founding member in 1984 of Olathe's Indian
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