History have reported on early maps as “Boca Ratones,” many people wrongly assumed that the name simply says in English “Rat’s Mouth”. The word boca (or mouth, in English) from time to time is used to describe an inlet, while rat n (mouse, in English) was used by Spanish sailors to describe rocks that scratched or broken boats. The name Boca Ratones originally appeared on eighteenth century maps associated with an inlet in the area of Biscayne Bay in Miami. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the term was mistakenly moved north on most maps and applied to Lake Boca Raton, whose inlet was closed at that time. The recent history of the city begins with the Addison Mizner’s Boca Raton Hotel. The “pink hotel” is still visible several miles as a building on the Intracoastal Waterway. The Pearl City neighborhood of Boca Raton was originally established to house the service personnel of the hotel.Japanese farmers of the Yamato Colony converted the land west of the city into pineapple plantations beginning in 1904. During World War II much of their land was confiscated and used as test site B-29 bombers. The fields of the air base was donated to become the site of Florida Atlantic University, from which many of its runways were parking at the base, while part of the base is now used by the Boca Raton Airport. The Japanese colonial legacy is remembered in Yamato Yamato Road (NW 51st Street) north of the airport and at the Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens in the northwest of the city. The Boca Raton Resort Club Tower has a height of 91 meters, has 28 floors and was completed in 1969. It is the tallest building in Boca Raton. Boca Raton was the site of two amusement parks still missing, Africa USA (1953-1961) and Ancient America (1953-1959). Africa USA was a wild animal park in which tourists traveled in a “Jeep Safari Train” throughout the park.It is now the Camino Gardens subdivision one mile west of Boca Raton Hotel. Ancient America was built surrounding a mound where lies a royal cemetery Calusa Indians. Today, the mound is still visible from U.S. Route 1 near Yamato Road. In the late 1960s, Boca Raton became the southern headquarters of International Business Machines Corporation. In 1965, with the extension of I-95 south of Florida, IBM purchased several hundred acres of real estate just west of the CSX rail line in northwest Florida Atlantic University. The construction of IBM’s main complex began in 1967 and the office complex was completed in March 1970. The center was designed with self-sufficiency in mind, and it had its own electrical substation, water pumping stations. There was mass production of System/360 computers. IBM was the birthplace of IBM PC, which later evolved into the IBM Personal System / 2.In 1987, IBM relocated their factories that went to the IBM PC Company to Research Triangle Park in Raleigh, North Carolina, and became the sumptuous manufacturing units in offices and laboratories, later producing great products, such as the operating system OS / 2 and VoiceType Dictation, known today as the voice recognition software ViaVoice. Boca Corporate Center and Campus originally was one of the labs where the IBM PC was created. T-REX Corporate Center was originally one of IBM’s research labs where the IBM PC was created. It is located on Yamato Rd (NW 51st St), and is located near the Boca Raton Tri-Rail Station. IBM maintained its facilities at Boca Raton until 1996, when they were closed and was sold to Blue Lake Real Estate (Real Estate Blue Lake), who sold it to T-REX Management Consortium. Today, T-REX has revitalized the facility and produced a business park and research success.What was formerly the IBM Building 051, a separate annex to the former IBM campus at Spanish River Boulevard was donated to the Palm Beach County School District (School District of Palm Beach County) and was converted into the Don Estridge High Tech Middle School. It was named in honor of Don Estridge, whose team was responsible for developing the IBM PC. IBM later returned in 2001 opening the software development laboratory off Congress Avenue in July of that year. In the 1980s, due to increased development to the west of the historic center of the city, some eastern areas began to decay, including the central and commercial area. For example, the old Boca Raton Mall, a shopping mall in the central area began to have lots of empty rooms, and occupied by marginal tenants, after the opening of Town Center at Boca Raton in an area west of the city, in 1979.Following this, in the late 1980s, the city was revived with a master plan to revitalize the downtown area and shopping district, which included the development of a new commercial district, building infrastructure, creating green areas, expansion Central Park, Sanborn Square, and restoration of old Town Hall to be transformed into a museum (the city council moved there in the late 1980s). Mizner Park is a great attraction in the financial district of Boca Raton.
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