 | |
| Company type | Public |
|---|---|
| Industry | Computers |
| Founded | 1977 in Provo, Utah |
| Founder | Roger Billings |
| Fate | Dissolution |
| Divisions | Caldisk |
Billings Computer Corporation was a publicly traded [1] computer company and fully owned subsidiary of Billings Energy Corporation, a defunct American energy company based in Provo, Utah, that specialized in hydrogen fuel. Billings Computer was active between 1977 and 1985 and released several minicomputers and microcomputer systems.
Roger Billings of Provo, Utah, founded Billings Computer in early 1977, four years after incorporating parent company Billings Energy Corporation. [2] Billings Energy was a hydrogen fuel company that served as a springboard for Roger Billings and his associates' research; in the 1960s, the former earned a scholarship to Brigham Young University after winning an international high school science fair in 1965, with his project—a conversion of his father's Ford Model A into running on hydrogen. [3] The company's computer subsidiary grew to be larger than its energy-focused parent company and made Billings a millionaire within three years of Billings Computer's incorporation. [4] [5] In March 1980, Billings designed a hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered forklift for the USDOS before moving the parent company to Independence, Missouri. Billings Computer remained in Provo, where its over 150 employees worked. [6] [7] This was six times the amount of employees in September 1977 but down from the subsidiary's peak headcount of 250 in September 1979. [2] [8]
The company's first computer system, the Data-Byte System 1, was announced in September 1977. It is a minicomputer based on the company's own design and was sold with the company's own dumb terminal, the B-100. The base system was sold with the central processing unit and front panel, the terminal, dual 8-inch floppy disk drives, and a bidirectional line printer. The system came shipped with its primary operating system and Fortran IV compiler. Optional was a memory module housing up to 1 MB of RAM, 50- and 300-MB hard disk drives, acoustic couplers, higher-speed printers, plotters, and ADC/DAC modules. [2] [9] Billings followed up their Data-Byte with the Billings Microsystem in February 1979. The Microsystem was an all-in-one microcomputer based on a 4 MHz Zilog Z80 microprocessor with 64 KB of RAM (8 KB definable as random-access or read-only), dual 5.25-inch floppy drives, and a 94-key keyboard. [10] [11] The Microsystem took US$1 million and four months to develop, over the final quarter of 1978. [10] The company sold 100 units of the Microsystem into August 1979. [12]
In the beginning of 1979, Billings Computer announced their pending acquisition of the disk drive division of Calcomp (California Computer Products Inc.) for $1.8 million. [13] [14] Billings were joined in their acquisition of Calcomp by Xerox and Sanders Associates, the former buying the vast majority of Calcomp's solid-state memory assets and the latter buying all other assets of Calcomp outright, including the trademark. [15] [16] The acquisition was finalized in May 1979. [16] While Billings initially suggested that they would move Calcomp's disk drive operations in Anaheim, California, to Provo, [13] [17] they retracted their plans move immediately and kept the factory in Anaheim until 1981. [4] [18] The division was later renamed to Caldisk; [19] Berne D. Broadbent was named its president. [20]
While its parent company reported losses for fiscal year 1978, [21] Billings Computer had raked in $466,000 in net profit on $2,495,000 sales in the second fiscal quarter of 1979 alone. [19] In preparation of growing demand, Billings Computer in August 1979 announced the raising of a 50,000-square-foot factory in Trenton, Utah in which to house new assembly lines for their products. [22] Even with their success, the larger Billings Energy Corporation had yet to turn a profit by mid-1980, [23] and in October 1980, Billings laid off a large percent of Caldisk amid constricting cash flow in the company, as well as failure to receive necessary parts for disk drives from other companies in the sluggish early 1980s economy. [24]
In 1981 the company released the BC-12 and BC-12FD, all-in-one microcomputers like its predecessor the Microsystem based on the Z80A; they ran OASIS, a single-user operating system. [25] In May 1982, Billings Computer introduced the 6000 series of modular minicomputers. The 6000 series comprised a stack of cabinets, each one serving a different purpose, and a CRT monitor intended to go on top. The main cabinet of the minicomputer was the 6000 CPU, housing the computer's main Z80A microprocessor and nine expansion slots (none populated by default); the 6000 CPU-1, with a second Z80A processor seven expansion slots and a floppy disk drive; and the 6000 CPU-2, which has two such disk drives and a third Z80A processor. Each cabinet houses 64 KB of RAM with parity. Optional was a video board, additional disk controllers, a mass-storage controller board for hard disks and tape drives (the latter making use of the board's integrated parallel interface), a dual-channel RS-232 serial interface board, and a serial communication interface board with support for asynchronous, synchronous, and bit-oriented communications protocols. [26] The first customer of the 6000 series was Winnebago Industries of Forest City, Iowa. [27] Chairman of Winnebago, John K. Hanson, paid for 100 units from the 6000 system family out of pocket, as his investment in both Winnebago and Billings posed a conflict of interest. Hanson later relinquished all his shares of Billings stock in August 1982. [28] [29]
Billings simultaneously released the 500 series, an upgraded version of the BC-12 line with an improved, non-glare CRT display, an internal power supply, and a detachable keyboard. The 500 series was available in three variants, each with 56 KB of RAM, which could hold up to 4 MB in mass storage. Multiple 500 machines could be hooked up to the 6000, the latter acting as a file server. [26]
In October 1982, Billings Energy—now based in Missouri—sold off $5 million worth of acreage dedicated to the Billings Computer both to relieve debts and buy up minority interests in the company. [27] [30] The next year in March, they opened a training center for the company's customers in Salt Lake City, Utah. [31] In October 1984, after acquisitions of an unpaid loan to the order of $500,000 were launched against Billings' management, a group of gas and oil shareholders successfully ousted the company's board members, including Roger Billings. Discussions to sell off the computer division to the highest bidder were in talks among the new board members. [32] [33] The company instead moved the division's operations to Denver, Colorado, to be closer to its main client there. [34]
A microcomputer is a small, relatively inexpensive computer having a central processing unit (CPU) made out of a microprocessor. The computer also includes memory and input/output (I/O) circuitry together mounted on a printed circuit board (PCB). Microcomputers became popular in the 1970s and 1980s with the advent of increasingly powerful microprocessors. The predecessors to these computers, mainframes and minicomputers, were comparatively much larger and more expensive. Many microcomputers are also personal computers. An early use of the term "personal computer" in 1962 predates microprocessor-based designs. (See "Personal Computer: Computers at Companies" reference below). A "microcomputer" used as an embedded control system may have no human-readable input and output devices. "Personal computer" may be used generically or may denote an IBM PC compatible machine.
Pertec Computer Corporation (PCC), formerly Peripheral Equipment Corporation (PEC), was a computer company based in Chatsworth, California which originally designed and manufactured peripherals such as floppy drives, tape drives, instrumentation control and other hardware for computers.
Pascal MicroEngine is a series of microcomputer products manufactured by Western Digital from 1979 through the mid-1980s, designed specifically to run the UCSD p-System efficiently. Compared to other microcomputers, which use a machine language p-code interpreter, the Pascal MicroEngine has its interpreter implemented in microcode; p-code is its machine language. The most common programming language used on the p-System is Pascal.
Ohio Scientific, Inc., was a privately owned American computer company based in Ohio that built and marketed computer systems, expansions, and software from 1975 to 1986. Their best-known products were the Challenger series of microcomputers and Superboard single-board computers. The company was the first to market microcomputers with hard disk drives in 1977.
Micral is a series of microcomputers produced by the French company Réalisation d'Études Électroniques, beginning with the Micral N in early 1973. The Micral N was one of the first commercially available microprocessor-based computer.
Calcomp Technology, Inc., often referred to as Calcomp or CalComp, was a company best known for its Calcomp plotters.
Realistic Controls Corporation (NCC), later Nylac Computer Corporation and Archives, Inc., was an American computer company based in Davenport, Iowa, founded in 1974.
Onyx Systems, Inc. was a computer hardware and software company founded in Cupertino, California in 1979 by Bob Marsh and Kip Myers, former managers in Zilog's systems group. It was one of the earliest vendors of microprocessor-based Unix systems.
Smoke Signal Broadcasting, Inc. (SSB), later known as Smoke Signal, was an American computer company founded in 1976 by Frederic Jerome "Ric" Hammond of Hollywood, California. The company earned its reputation by offering expansions for the Southwest Technical Products (SWTPC) 6800 microcomputer. It later manufactured its own line of computers, called the Chieftain. Though it remains little-known, Smoke Signal was an early and important manufacturer of multi-user computer systems.
Pacific Cyber/Metrix, Inc. was an American computer company based in California. The company was founded in 1975 in San Ramon, California.
Parasitic Engineering, Inc., was an American computer company founded by Howard Fullmer and Gene Nardi in 1974. Named as a tongue-in-cheek reference to a comment by MITS co-founder Ed Roberts, Parasitic's first products were hardware upgrade kits to MITS' Altair 8800 microcomputer kit, improving the latter's power supply rating and susceptibility to noise. The company later released their own microcomputer based on the same bus as the Altair, the S-100, but it was less popular than the company's hardware-improvement kits. By 1979, the company had pivoted to providing upgrades to Tandy's TRS-80. Parasitic went defunct in 1983.
Midwest Scientific Instruments, Inc. (MSI), often shortened to Midwest Scientific, was an American computer company founded in Olathe, Kansas, in the early 1970s. Charles C. Childress, a doctorate of biochemistry, founded the company as a way to market his data acquisition and processing interfaces based on programmable calculators for medical, scientific, and industrial uses. After an after-market floppy drive system for the SWTPC 6800 proved a hot-seller for Midwest in 1976, the company began products for general-purpose computers like the SWTPC. In 1977, they released their own microcomputer, the MSI 6800—a clone of the SWTPC 6800. Their sales tripled that year and prompted expansion in the Kansas City area. It survived into the mid-1980s before going defunct and having its remaining assets auctioned off.
Quasar Data Products Inc. (QDP), later QDP Computer Systems Inc., was an American computer company based in 1979 in North Olmsted, Ohio, United States. The company was founded by Brian A. Catalucci and Dave L. Kelley, the former a trained engineer who had previously worked as an airline pilot.
Zeda Computers International Limited, trading as Zeda Computer Systems, was an American computer company based in Provo, Utah, and with overseas office in Nottingham. Founded in 1974, their best-selling computer was the Zeda 580, a Zilog Z80-based all-in-one microcomputer.
3R Computers, Inc., or RRR Computers, Inc., later Avatar Technologies, was an American computer company based in Westborough, Massachusetts, known for their Avatar series of dumb terminal-to-workstation devices.
Terak Corporation was an American computer company based in Scottsdale, Arizona. The company was among the first to market graphical workstations, with their most successful being the Terak 8510/a in 1977. After going public in 1983, the company was acquired by Sanders Associates, who placed it under their CalComp division.
Northwest Microcomputer Systems, Inc. (NMS), was a short-lived, privately owned American computer company active from 1977 to the early 1980s and based out of Oregon. The company was co-founded by several computer engineers and investors, including Randy Bush.
Jonos International, Inc., originally Jonos, Ltd. (JL), later Netcom Research, Inc., was an American computer company active from 1980 to 1992. The company sold a variety of computer hardware products and systems, including STD Bus peripherals, smart terminals, microcomputers, and portable computers. The company's Courier portable computer was the first microcomputer sold with Sony's then-new 3.5-inch floppy disk drives on its release in June 1982. Jonos' systems were widely used in the fields of construction, roadworks, machining, and military.
Kennedy Company, often shortened to Kennedy Co., was an American computer storage company active from 1963 to 1988. Founded by Charles J. Kennedy (1920–1996) and based in the Greater Los Angeles area, the company was one of the largest independent manufacturers of magnetic-tape data drives for mainframe and minicomputer users. Beginning in the late 1970s, the company also manufactured hard disk drives. In 1979, Kennedy was acquired by Allegheny Ludlum, where it continued to operate independently as a subsidiary. In 1987, it was acquired by Shugart Corporation, who promptly sold off Kennedy's assets to Irwin Magnetic Systems.