Raxco

Last updated

Raxco Software Inc. was a Gaithersburg, Maryland software company. Founded in 1978, [1] the company's products have been sold internationally. [2]

Contents

The company spun off one division as Axent Technologies; the latter was "acquired by venture capital firms in 1988." [3] Meanwhile Raxco continued with its own product offerings. PerfectDisk became its flagship software package. [4] [5]

Raxco transitioned from its 1980s [6] and 1990s VAX [7] (VMS) [8] [9] and OpenVMS [10] [11] software product line, and did a Management buyout [12] to become a private, [1] independent company.

Interim ownerships

From the later 1990s thru the early 2000s, corporate ownership of the two organizations transitioned:

Raxco, which had retained its identity, then changed its course from VAX/VMS to the PC/Server world in 2003. [16]

Raxco closed operations in May, 2024. [17] All their standalone products will continue to work, but no activations will be made, and no updates or support will be offered. Subscription based products will remain functional until their expiration date.

Raxco Software, Inc.
IndustrySoftware
Founded1978
Products PerfectDisk, PerfectUpdater,
PerfectRegistry, PerfectGuard, InstantRescue, PerfectFileRecovery
Website www.raxco.com

History

During the 1980s, [6] using the collective name RAXCO Rabbit Software, [18] the company marketed a series of nine software packages for the VAX:

Raxco's VAX product line was still active in the 1990s, [21] even as it was building and expanding its PC Product line. [22] By 2003 the PC desktop and server market became the company's focus. [23]

Product line

Aside from PerfectDisk, [24] the company also markets:

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital Equipment Corporation</span> U.S. computer manufacturer (1957–1998)

Digital Equipment Corporation, using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until he was forced to resign in 1992, after the company had gone into precipitous decline.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenVMS</span> Computer operating system

OpenVMS, often referred to as just VMS, is a multi-user, multiprocessing and virtual memory-based operating system. It is designed to support time-sharing, batch processing, transaction processing and workstation applications. Customers using OpenVMS include banks and financial services, hospitals and healthcare, telecommunications operators, network information services, and industrial manufacturers. During the 1990s and 2000s, there were approximately half a million VMS systems in operation worldwide.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ultrix</span> Series of discontinued Unix operating systems by DEC

Ultrix is the brand name of Digital Equipment Corporation's (DEC) discontinued native Unix operating systems for the PDP-11, VAX, MicroVAX and DECstations.

Pyramid Technology Corporation was a computer company that produced a number of RISC-based minicomputers at the upper end of the performance range. It was based in the San Francisco Bay Area of California

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Norton Utilities</span> Computer utility software

Norton Utilities is a utility software suite designed to help analyze, configure, optimize and maintain a computer. The latest version of the original series of Norton Utilities is Norton Utilities 16 for Windows XP/Vista/7/8 was released 26 October 2012.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rainbow 100</span> DEC microcomputer

The Rainbow 100 is a microcomputer introduced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1982. This desktop unit had a monitor similar to the VT220 and a dual-CPU box with both 4 MHz Zilog Z80 and 4.81 MHz Intel 8088 CPUs. The Rainbow 100 was a triple-use machine: VT100 mode, 8-bit CP/M mode, and CP/M-86 or MS-DOS mode using the 8088. It ultimately failed to in the marketplace which became dominated by the simpler IBM PC and its clones which established the industry standard as compatibility with CP/M became less important than IBM PC compatibility. Writer David Ahl called it a disastrous foray into the personal computer market. The Rainbow was launched along with the similarly packaged DEC Professional and DECmate II which were also not successful. The failure of DEC to gain a significant foothold in the high-volume PC market would be the beginning of the end of the computer hardware industry in New England, as nearly all computer companies located there were focused on minicomputers for large organizations, from DEC to Data General, Wang, Prime, Computervision, Honeywell, and Symbolics Inc.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PC Tools (software)</span> Collection of software utlities

PC Tools is a collection of software utilities for DOS developed by Central Point Software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">VAXstation</span> Family of DEC workstation computers

The VAXstation is a discontinued family of workstation computers developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation using processors implementing the VAX instruction set architecture. VAXstation systems were typically shipped with either the OpenVMS or ULTRIX operating systems. Many members of the VAXstation family had corresponding MicroVAX variants, which primarily differ by the lack of graphics hardware.

Cincom Systems, Inc., is a privately held multinational computer technology corporation founded in 1968 by Tom Nies, Tom Richley, and Claude Bogardus.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Diskeeper</span> Hard-drive defragmentation program

Diskeeper is a discontinued defragmentation app, designed for Microsoft Windows. It was developed by Executive Software International, Inc., which later changed its name to Diskeeper Corporation, and is now called Condusiv Technologies. The final version of Diskeeper was released in March 2020. All of Diskeeper's features and functionality are now included in Condusiv's data performance software DymaxIO.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gold key (DEC)</span> Computer keyboard key

The Gold key is a computer keyboard key used as a prefix to invoke a variety of single-key editing and formatting functions. Usually located in the top-left position of the numeric keypad on platforms such as the VT100, it is the signature element of a consistent user interface implemented by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) across multiple product lines.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microsoft Drive Optimizer</span> Windows utility which defragments a hard drive

Microsoft Drive Optimizer is a utility in Microsoft Windows designed to increase data access speed by rearranging files stored on a disk to occupy contiguous storage locations, a technique called defragmentation. Microsoft Drive Optimizer was first officially shipped with Windows XP.

Condusiv Technologies is an American software company based in Burbank, California. The company was formerly known as Diskeeper Corporation, a name derived from its flagship product, Diskeeper, a file-system defragmentation software package for Microsoft Windows and OpenVMS. Before adopting the Diskeeper name, the company was known as Executive Software International, Inc.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fifth Generation Systems</span> Computer security company

Fifth Generation Systems, Inc., was a computer security company founded October 1984 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, United States by Robert Mitchell, Leroy Mitchell, Roger Ivey, and Bruce Ray. All four later left the company after it was acquired by Barry Bellue who was accused by the founders of fraud and continued theft from company accounts for illegal personal use. Fifth Generation's initial commercial product was FastBack, an early competitor to The Norton Backup from Symantec.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Britton Lee, Inc.</span> American relational database company

Britton Lee Inc. was a pioneering relational database company. Renamed ShareBase, it was acquired by Teradata in June, 1990.

The Wollongong Group (TWG) was one of the first companies to sell commercial software products based on the Unix operating system. It was founded to market a port of Unix Version 6 developed by researchers at the University of Wollongong, Australia. The company was active in Palo Alto, California from 1980 to 1995.

Norton, formerly known as Norton by Symantec, is a brand of Gen Digital co-headquartered in Tempe, Arizona and Prague, Czech Republic. Norton originally provided utility software for DOS, and currently offers a variety of products and services related to digital security, identity protection, and online privacy and utilities.

PerfectDisk is a defragmentation software product for Windows developed by Raxco.

Systime Computers Ltd was a British computer manufacturer and systems integrator of the 1970s and 1980s. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Systime became the second-largest British manufacturer of computers, specializing in the minicomputer market.

Logicraft was an American software company. The company's products enabled Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) minicomputers to run PC software.

References

  1. 1 2 "Company Overview of Raxco Software, Inc". Bloomberg News .
  2. ↑ Japanese site: "PowerX PerfectDisk".
  3. 1 2 Stan Hinden (February 19, 1996). "Software Firm Looks for Security in Public Offering". The Washington Post .
  4. ↑ Les Freed (August 2002). "Defrag with PerfectDisk". PC Magazine . Vol. 21, no. 14. Ziff Davis. p. 56. ISSN   0888-8507.
  5. ↑ "Raxco Rabbit Software, Monitors DEC VAX, Provides graphics analysis". Computerworld. October 19, 1987.
  6. 1 2 "RABBIT Software from RAXCO ... speed up response times, .. improve your through-put without having to purchase more (hardware)" "Snippet view". Computer Decisions. 1983.
  7. ↑ "Raxco Rabbit Software, Monitors DEC VAX, Provides graphics analysis..." Computerworld. October 19, 1987.
  8. ↑ Len Grzpanka (April 29, 1991). "Raxco releases enhanced VMS monitoring software". Digital News . pp. 27, 73.
  9. ↑ pre-OpenVMS
  10. ↑ "Raxco optimizes OpenVMS". Computerworld. October 24, 1994. p. 84.
  11. ↑ "In 1991, Digital announced that the VAX/VMS operating system would ..."Michael D Duffy (2002). Getting Started with OpenVMS: A Guide for New Users. ISBN   0080507352.
  12. ↑ led by Robert Nolan "Raxco Has Innovative Recipe for NT Market"., who back in 1991 – 1993 "Developed and managed channel sales partners for Raxco software products throughout Europe and Asia." "Robert Nolan".
  13. ↑ "Axent: digital bodyguards". Forbes. May 20, 1998.
  14. ↑ "Symantec Will Purchase Axent in $975 Million Stock Transaction". The New York Times. July 28, 2000.
  15. ↑ Trevor Eddolls (December 17, 2007). "SOA still offering availability".
  16. ↑ "Raxco is a noted name in the business of disk defragmentation." Jeremy Moskowitz (2006). Group Policy, Profiles, and IntelliMirror for Windows 2003, Windows ... ISBN   0470113219.
  17. ↑ "Raxco Software". Archived from the original on May 11, 2024.
  18. ↑ "Raxco Rabbit Software, Monitors DEC VAX, Provides graphics analysis..." Computerworld. October 19, 1987.
  19. ↑ prior to PerfectDisk, which came a decade or so later!
  20. ↑ full title: V.A.S.T. - VAX Accelerator Software Technology
  21. ↑ "Raxco optimizes OpenVMS". Computerworld . October 24, 1994. p. 84.
  22. ↑ "Raxco presents new PerfectDisk 2000". PC Magazine . Ziff Davis. June 8, 1999.
  23. ↑ "Raxco is a noted name in the business of disk defragmentation."Jeremy Moskowitz (2006). Group Policy, Profiles, and IntelliMirror for Windows 2003, Windows ... ISBN   0470113219.
  24. ↑ Serdar Yegulalp (March 3, 2009). "What Windows 7 Needs To Succeed". InformationWeek .
  25. ↑ introduced 2011 "RAXCO Markets New Product "Perfectupdater"".
  26. ↑ Reviewed in "Review: PerfectRegistry aims to speed up your PC". PCworld. March 20, 2013.
  27. ↑ noting that it "automatically creates a system restore point before fixing anything so you can undo the changes if needed."
  28. ↑ Trademark file June 20, 2012 "PERFECTGUARD Trademark of Raxco Software, Inc".
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.