Co-founder of Kingston Technology Corporation John Tu, first founded Camintonn with his partner David Sun, sold it four years later and then set up this company. A decade later Tu and Sun sold 80 percent of this company to Softbank for $1.5bn and then in 1999 bought it back for $450 million. Today, with Tu at the helm, Kingston Technology Corporation is America’s largest privately-held computer memory outfit. The reason Tu and Sun established it, was because they noticed an inadequate amount of surface-mount memory chips in the high-tech marketplace in the 1980s, so with their engineering background they designed a new Single In Line Memory Module (SIMM) using older technology through-hole components.