Panda Project

Last updated
The Panda Project, Inc.
Company typePublic
Nasdaq: PNDA [1] : 8D 
IndustryComputer
FoundedApril 1992;32 years ago (1992-04) in Boca Raton, Florida, United States
FounderStanford W. Crane, Jr.
DefunctJune 2004;20 years ago (2004-06)
FateRemaining assets sold off in April 2000; re-emerged as Coda Octopus Group in 2004
Number of employees
~140 (1995, peak) [2]
Website pandaproject.com at the Wayback Machine (archived 1997-02-06)

The Panda Project, Inc., was an American computer company active from 1992 to 2000. It was best known for the Archistrat family of high-end workstations and servers, which made use of a custom, 256-bit backplane design accommodating a number of computer architectures. The Archistrat was short-lived and sold in low quantity. [3]

Contents

History

The Panda Project, Inc., was founded in April 1992 in Boca Raton, Florida, by Stanford W. Crane Jr. [4] : 7E  Crane had previously worked for AMP Incorporated and Molex Corporation, two major companies in the field of electrical connectors, in the 1970s and 1980s. In the mid-1980s, Crane founded his first startup, Crane Electronics, to compete with his former employers; that company declared bankruptcy in 1986. Six years later, Crane founded Panda Project in Boca Raton, occupying the 1,900-square-foot former offices of Don Estridge, one of the major architects of the IBM Personal Computer. [5] [6] [lower-alpha 1] In naming his company, Crane chose a non-technical name to evoke an air of secrecy and to ward off competitors of the company's true nature. [8] [9]

Within two years of founding Panda Project, Crane had managed to court many former employees of IBM, including Joseph A. Sarubbi, another architect of IBM's PC XT; [10] Bruce Smith, a project manager of the PC division at IBM; and Greg Simco, a technical lead for IBM's OS/2 operating system. [5] By March 1995, Panda Project had managed to accrue over a dozen further IBM alumni, including H. L. "Sparky" Sparks, a senior manager at IBM who had helped established the first dealer networks for the IBM PC back in 1981. [11]

Between March and May 1994, Panda Project began preparing to file its initial public offering, which commenced in the third week of May 1994. [12] [13] [14] The $10 million raised from its IPO was funneled back into Panda Project to fund the company's research and development for computer hardware products. [5] [13] [15]

Panda Project's first product was VSPA (Very Small Peripheral Array), a packaging technology for surface-mount integrated circuits. Announced in September 1994, VSPA allowed for a 60-to-70-percent reduction in the size of ICs versus those housed in contemporaneous plastic quad flat packs (PQFPs). [5] [16] The VSPA package was a three-dimensional design making use of overlapping, receding carriers (similar in shape to a step pyramid) in order to pack more leads into the same surface area. [17] [18] Panda Project co-developed VSPA with IBM Microelectronics at their Manufacturing Technology Center facility in Boca Raton. [5] [16] The machinery to build VSPA ICs was delivered to Panda Project from IBM in April 1995, [19] [20] and the first successful prototypes of a VSPA graphics chip were demonstrated to Cirrus Logic, a prospective licensee by the end of May 1995. [21] The technology was first licensed in 1996 to AMP Incorporated, Crane's former employer. [22]

In 1995, [23] Panda Project introduced their first computer system, the Archistrat, which was a family of Intel x86-based workstations and servers featuring a custom backplane design whose connectors were 256 bits wide and made use of Panda Project's patented Compass connector design. The main components of the computer, including the CPU, chipset, and PCI and ISA expansion slots, resided on a single board that connected to the backplane, while the RAM was contained on its own separate board connected to the backplane, as was its I/O connectors. This arrangement was intended to make the computer easier to upgrade and resilient against obsolescence, since it could theoretically accommodate other 32-bit computer architectures such as PowerPC and 64-bit architectures such as DEC Alpha by just replacing the CPU board. [24] [25] The Compass connector was a pin grid array design, in which each pin is split into four and arranged into quadrant occupying the footprint of the average pin on a normal PGA. This allowed up to 146 contacts per linear inch, or up to 1,100 contacts per square inch. [26] The tower case of the Archistrat eschewed from the beige box designs of its contemporaries in favor of a bulbous design with a bold assortment of colors. [4] : 7E 

The Archistrat was first unveiled to the public at the June 1995 PC EXPO in New York where it gathered large crowds; [27] it was later featured on the front cover of Byte magazine's October 1995 issue, underneath the headline "The PC is dead". [28] After its release in the first week of October 1995, [2] Network World gave the Archistrat mixed reviews, the magazine's editors praising its innovation but finding its raw performance middling. [29] : 41–44  [30] : 61 

In April 1998, Panda Project announced their second computer system family, Rock City, which was a cube-shaped desktop computer running Intel's Pentium MMX processor clocked between 200 MHz and 233 MHz. The Rock City's case had lightning strike patterns etched into the case, which rested diagonally on one of vertices on the provided stand. [31] [32]

Before the company ever produced any Rock City machines, however, Panda Project abruptly announced that they had divested their computer systems division to Round Stone Holdings, a British firm, in November 1998. As part of the deal, Round Stone Holdings acquired all the development rights, tooling, and inventory for all of Panda Project's computer systems. Following the acquisition, Panda Project focused chiefly on commercializing their VSPA chip carrier design, which had failed to gain many design wins after a few years on the market. [3] In 1999, Panda Project sold their VSPA patents and remaining assets to Silicon Bandwidth, a start-up company based in San Bruno, California, leaving the company as a non-praciticing, public shell company. Crane resigned as chairman and CEO of the company in April 2000, he and his wife leaving the company the same month. [33] In June 2004, Panda Project acquired three branches of Coda Octopus, a vendor of seafloor mapping and visualization software, and re-emerged as the Coda Octopus Group, which is still in business as of October 2024. [34]

Notes

  1. ↑ The company leased an additional 4,800-square-foot office at the Arvida Park of Commerce in Boca Raton, Florida, in April 1994. [7]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IBM Personal Computer</span> Personal computer model released in 1981

The IBM Personal Computer is the first microcomputer released in the IBM PC model line and the basis for the IBM PC compatible de facto standard. Released on August 12, 1981, it was created by a team of engineers and designers at International Business Machines (IBM), directed by William C. Lowe and Philip Don Estridge in Boca Raton, Florida.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Boca Raton, Florida</span> City in Palm Beach County, Florida

Boca Raton is a city in Palm Beach County, Florida, United States. The population was 97,422 in the 2020 census and it ranked as the 23rd-largest city in Florida in 2022. However, many people with a Boca Raton postal address live outside of municipal boundaries, such as in West Boca Raton. As a business center, the city also experiences significant daytime population increases. Boca Raton is 45 miles (72 km) north of Miami and is a principal city of the Miami metropolitan area, which had a population of 6,138,333 at the 2020 United States Census.

Packard Bell was a personal computer hardware brand active from the late 1980s to the 2010s. It originated as Packard Bell Electronics, Inc., an independent American computer company founded in Los Angeles in 1986 by Israeli-American investors who bought the trademark rights to the historic Packard Bell Corporation from Teledyne; in spite of similarities in their names, Packard Bell had no connection to either Hewlett Packard or Bell System.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philip Don Estridge</span> American personal computer industry pioneer (1937–1985)

Philip Donald Estridge, known as Don Estridge, was an American computer engineer who led development of the original IBM Personal Computer (PC), and thus is known as the "father of the IBM PC". He opened its specifications, which revolutionized the computer industry, resulting in a vast increase in sales of personal computers and creating an entire industry of hardware compatible PCs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Workplace OS</span> Defunct 1990s operating system

Workplace OS is IBM's ultimate operating system prototype of the 1990s. It is the product of an exploratory research program in 1991 which yielded a design called the Grand Unifying Theory of Systems (GUTS), proposing to unify the world's systems as generalized "personalities" cohabitating concurrently upon a universally sophisticated platform of object-oriented frameworks upon one microkernel. Using personalities, a single machine would be able to run applications from multiple conventional operating systems like Unix or OS/2.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Palm Tran</span> Public transit bus system in Palm Beach County, Florida

Palm Tran is the public transit bus system run by the Palm Beach County Government, serving Palm Beach County, Florida. In 2023, the system had a ridership of 8,612,200, or about 31,300 per weekday as of the second quarter of 2024. Palm Tran also serves a portion of Broward County, Florida where it overlaps with Broward County Transit. Palm Tran has four main facilities with its main headquarters in West Palm Beach on Electronics Way. The current executive director is Clinton B. Forbes.

The Boca Raton News, owned by the South Florida Media Company, was the local community newspaper of Boca Raton, Florida. The paper began publication December 2, 1955, with a startup circulation of 1200, published by Robert and Lora Britt, and edited by Margert Olsson. Initially a weekly publication, it later began daily operation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mylex</span> American computer company

Mylex Corporation was an American computer company active from 1983 to 1999. The company mainly produced peripherals and expansion cards for personal computers—chiefly the IBM Personal Computer—for the bulk of its existence, although it also produced complete motherboards. In the mid-1990s the company focused on designing and manufacturing RAID controllers, eventually cornering 75 percent of the RAID controller market. In 1999, the company was acquired by and made a subsidiary of IBM for approximately $240 million. In 2002, IBM sold their Mylex division to LSI Logic for an undisclosed amount.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hal Prewitt</span> American artist, photographer, race car driver, inventor (b. 1954)

Harold D. Prewitt, Jr (Hal) is an artist, photographer, race car driver, businessperson, inventor of personal computer products and early pioneer in the personal computer revolution. He resides in South Beach.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IBM Personal Computer XT</span> Personal computer model released in 1983

The IBM Personal Computer XT is the second computer in the IBM Personal Computer line, released on March 8, 1983. Except for the addition of a built-in hard drive and extra expansion slots, it is very similar to the original IBM PC model 5150 from 1981.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Boca Raton Bowl</span> Annual American college football postseason game

The Boca Raton Bowl is an annual National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) sanctioned post-season Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) college football bowl game played in Boca Raton, Florida, since December 2014 on the campus of Florida Atlantic University (FAU) at FAU Stadium. Winners of the game received the Howard Schnellenberger championship trophy, named for the football head coach at FAU from 2001 to 2011.

Daniel Cane is a founder of Blackboard Inc. and CourseInfo LLC. He is currently the CEO and co-founder of Modernizing Medicine.

Sarah Bachrodt is an American artist known for abstract expressionism paintings as well as her work in Interior design.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Boca Raton Historical Society and Museum</span>

The Boca Raton Historical Society & Museum is a non-profit organization and public museum dedicated to preserve and collect history and artifacts of Boca Raton, Florida, United States, for educational and advocacy purposes. The society is known for their goal of historic designation and restoring historical structures important to the history of Boca Raton. The society offers exhibits, lectures, lessons, history tours, and educational programs to achieve their goal. Many interactive educational programs and services of the society are provided to schools, teachers, and children to help educate Florida's history. Additionally, the community provides a library of collected and preserved artifacts, photographs, newspapers, diaries, reference books, and research papers documented for educational and research purposes. The historical society has been a contributor of researching local history of Florida and Boca Raton and offers scholars, educators, university graduates and interns access to their research collection and publications, such as the Spanish Papers. The Boca Raton Historical Museum is publicly open from Monday through Friday from 10am to 4pm.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IBM PCradio</span> Notebook computer released in 1991

The PCradio was a notebook computer released by International Business Machines (IBM) in late 1991. Designed primarily for mobile workers such as service technicians, salespersons and public safety workers, the PCradio featured a ruggedized build with no internal hard disk drive and was optioned with either a cellular or ARDIS RF modem, in addition to a standard landline modem.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reply Corporation</span> American computer company

Reply Corporation, often shortened to Reply Corp., was an American computer company based in San Jose, California. Founded in 1988 by Steve Petracca, the company licensed the Micro Channel architecture from IBM for their own computers released in 1989, competing against IBM's PS/2 line. The company later divested from offering complete systems in favor of marketing motherboard upgrades for older PS/2s. Reply enjoyed a close relationship with IBM, owing to many of its founding employees, including Petracca, having worked for IBM. The company was acquired by Radius in 1997.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IBM PS/2 Model 70</span>

The Personal System/2 Model 70 386 and Personal System/2 Model 70 486 are midrange desktop computers in IBM's Personal System/2 (PS/2) family of personal computers. The PS/2 Model 70 386, released in June 1988, features an Intel 386 microprocessor clocked between 16 MHz and 25 MHz and features the 32-bit Micro Channel architecture (MCA) bus; the Model 70 486, released in December 1989, features the Intel 486 clocked at 25 MHz and also includes the 32-bit MCA bus. The latter is essentially a Model 70 386 with the 486/25 Power Platform pre-installed; this was a CPU upgrade card for the Model 70 386 released earlier in October 1989 that was the first commercially available product to use the 486 processor. Both editions of Model 70 are housed in the same case as the earlier PS/2 Model 50 from 1987.

IBM EduQuest, later shortened to EduQuest, was a subsidiary of American multinational technology corporation IBM that catered to the elementary and secondary educational market. A spin-off of the company's Educational Systems division spearheaded by James Elton Dezell Jr. (1933–2000), EduQuest developed software and hardware for schools. Most prominent was their line of all-in-one personal computers, whose form factor was based on IBM's PS/2 Model 25.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Boca Research</span>

Boca Research, Inc., later Inprimis, Inc., was an American computer company based in Boca Raton, Florida, and active between 1985 and 2002. The company manufactured a variety of expansion cards for the IBM PC and compatible systems, including memory cards, networking cards, sound cards, and graphics cards. Once a major player in the computer networking market, being the fourth-largest manufacturer of modems in 1996, Boca Research abandoned the PC hardware market entirely amid falling market share and manufactured set-top boxes in the last years of its existence.

References

  1. ↑ Lorek, L. A. (January 24, 1996). "S. Florida called ripe for high-tech". South Florida Sun Sentinel: 1D, 8D – via Newspapers.com.
  2. 1 2 Pounds, Stephen (October 11, 1995). "Panda lays off 'a handful', cites job duplication as reason". The Palm Beach Post: 9B – via Newspapers.com.
  3. 1 2 Staff writer (November 12, 1998). "Panda Project Spins Off Systems Business to UK Firm". Computergram International. New Statesman Media Group. Archived from the original on October 16, 2024.
  4. 1 2 Pounds, Stephen (January 22, 1995). "Investors feed Panda Project's assault at computer niche". The Palm Beach Post: 1E, 7E – via Newspapers.com.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 McNair, James (October 24, 1994). "Boca firm promises new era for PCs". The Miami Herald: 7 – via Newspapers.com.
  6. ↑ Stern, Jamie (October 31, 1992). "CB Commercial lands dozen lease deals". Boca Raton News: 6C – via Newspapers.com.
  7. ↑ Staff writer (April 24, 1994). "CB Commercial announces leases". Boca Raton News: 2D – via Newspapers.com.
  8. ↑ Lorek, L. A. (February 11, 1996). "Panda Project should ride high-tech wave". South Florida Sun Sentinel: 3F – via Newspapers.com.
  9. ↑ Trigaux, Robert (August 17, 1995). "Group Tech, Panda sign deal". Tampa Bay Times: 6E – via Newspapers.com.
  10. ↑ Pounds, Stephen (January 24, 1996). "Former IBM exec recalls days of pioneering with Gates on PCs". The Palm Beach Post: 5B – via Newspapers.com.
  11. ↑ King, Marcus J. (March 27, 1995). "Panda assembles creative, credible talent". Boca Raton News: 10C – via Newspapers.com.
  12. ↑ Staff writer (March 25, 1994). "Panda Project files for offering". Boca Raton News: 5B – via Newspapers.com.
  13. 1 2 Staff writer (April 11, 1994). "Boca startup company planning to sell stock". The Miami Herald: 43 – via Newspapers.com.
  14. ↑ Staff writer (May 20, 1994). "Panda Project begins IPO". The Palm Beach Post: 9B – via Newspapers.com.
  15. ↑ Staff writer (November 14, 1994). "ACSYS selects service from Boca-based project". Boca Raton News: 5B – via Newspapers.com.
  16. 1 2 Staff writer (September 29, 1994). "Panda Project begins marketing". The Palm Beach Post: 6B – via Newspapers.com.
  17. ↑ Rosen, Carol (January 1995). "Ball grid arrays gain respectability". Electronic Business Buyer. 21 (1). Reed Business Information: 81 et seq– via Gale.
  18. ↑ Tummala, R. R.; Alan G. Klopfenstein (2013). Microelectronics Packaging Handbook: Semiconductor Packaging. Springer. pp. II-95–II-97. ISBN   9781461560371 – via Google Books.
  19. ↑ Staff writer (April 27, 1995). "Panda Project receives semiconductor package". The Miami Herald: 315 – via Newspapers.com.
  20. ↑ Staff writer (April 28, 1995). "Panda Project gets first IBM". Boca Raton News: 7B – via Newspapers.com.
  21. ↑ Staff writer (May 31, 1995). "Panda Project tests prototype". Boca Raton News: 19 – via Newspapers.com.
  22. ↑ O'Brien, Robert; Margot Habiby (June 12, 1996). "U.S. Stocks Lose Ground as Investors Remain Wary". The Asian Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones & Company: 15 – via ProQuest.
  23. ↑ "Definition of Archistrat computer". PCMag.com. Ziff-Davis. n.d. Archived from the original on May 22, 2024.
  24. ↑ Scannell, Ed (January 15, 1996). "Panda readies 166-MHz server". InfoWorld. 18 (5). IDG Publications: 35 – via Google Books.
  25. ↑ Coates, James (February 5, 1996). "Panda project may end constant state of PC envy". South Florida Sun Sentinel: 4 – via Newspapers.com.
  26. ↑ "Definition of Compass connector". PCMag.com. Ziff-Davis. n.d. Archived from the original on May 30, 2024.
  27. ↑ Lorek, L. A. (June 22, 1995). "What the market will bear". South Florida Sun Sentinel: 3D – via Newspapers.com.
  28. ↑ Staff writer (September 30, 1995). "CNN and Byte feature Panda Project". Boca Raton News: 13A – via Newspapers.com.
  29. ↑ Rinko-Gay, William L.; Lee Schlesinger (July 22, 1996). "Good, bad and different". Network World. 13 (39). IDG Publications: 40–44 – via Google Books.
  30. ↑ Rinko-Gay, William L.; Lee Schlesinger (September 23, 1996). "Old friends revisted". Network World. 13 (39). IDG Publications: 60–61 – via Google Books.
  31. ↑ Hu, Jim (April 15, 1998). "Sub-$1,000 PC gets new design". CNET. CBS Interactive. Archived from the original on August 12, 2023.
  32. ↑ Kirschner, Suzanne Kantra (July 1998). "What's New". Popular Science. 258 (1). Times Mirror Magazines: 8–17 – via Google Books.
  33. ↑ Staff writer (April 19, 2000). "Chairman, wife quit Panda Project". The Palm Beach Post: 8B – via Newspapers.com.
  34. ↑ "Coda Octopus Group, Inc.: Information and Disclosure Statement" (PDF). Coda Octopus Group. 2006. Archived from the original (PDF) on June 20, 2024.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.