Naval Base San Diego was already the largest naval base on the West Coast before any tech or biotech company existed there — 1,600 acres, homeport of the Pacific Fleet since the WWI-era shipbuilding boom that first cleared the land. In 1965, city and business leaders made a deliberate choice not to stay a one-industry Navy town: they zoned Torrey Pines Mesa for science. Two genuinely separate industries grew out of that decision — Qualcomm's wireless communications (1985) and a genomics cluster anchored by Illumina (1998) and the San Diego Zoo's Frozen Zoo — and eighty years after the base was built, defense tech is still the newest thing choosing San Diego, not the oldest thing holding it back. This site's own graph holds 29 real San Diego companies and investors, split almost evenly between the two engines, with Illumina itself still absent from the graph.