Sorry to bump an old thread, but I found some interesting information about the plant:
It was originally a DiscoVision plant! According Blam1's DiscoVision history
site, it was built from a closed furniture factory. It must have been established around 1977/8, because:
[*]MCA was still working on test discs at their Torrance laboratory in early 1977
[*]Universal-Pioneer, which was established in late 1977, used information from an operating Carson plant to establish their Kofu plant.
[*]The first commercial discs went on sale in 1978
On January 25th, 1981, DiscoVision Associates announced the plant was to close by the end of February that year (
NY Times &
Billboard Magazine).
DiscoVision, which had 1,000 employees at the time (
LA Times), did apparently another plant in Costa Mesa where they were headquartered (
New Scientist). According to the New Scientist article, this was a plant of "appaling" quality, with apparently nine-in-ten discs being faulty.
Starting in February 1981, DiscoVision Associates negotiated a sale of DiscoVision to Pioneer. I say "starting", because the deal as of the Feb 13th Billboard article and the actual deal don't seem to line up. Billboard said "A new Pioneer software plant is being targeted for California next year but not at the Carson site since the physical assets of DVA are not included in the buy." However, the LA Times article said that in
1982 DVA ended up selling everything but the patents. (That article was written in 1989, when IBM and MCA did end up selling DVA to Pioneer; by that time they had just 16 employees left).
Regardless, some way or another, the plants got sold to Pioneer. According to another
page on Blam1's site, the Costa Mesa plant was shut down, but the Carson facility went through an extensive re-tooling, and re-opened as the new Pioneer plant, which the magazine shows.
An apparent address of the Carson Pioneer plant was 1041 E 230th St., Carson, CA 90745. (See
this website.) I looked in Google earth, and it seems like it was demolished in 2005.
Here are some aerial photos of it from Google Earth (it's the bottom building):
However, it is possible that building was only some kind of warehouse. In those satellite images, I can't spot the four acrylic silos shown on the
first page of the OP's article - nor what look like train tracks. Maybe the plant itself was somewhere else in Carson, and that was a distribution point.