Advanced Logic Research

» see alr.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The ALR Revolution Q-SMP was a tower you could put four Pentiums in, with thirteen drive bays and ten expansion slots, and it won PC/Computing's Most Valuable Product award at COMDEX '94 and UNIX Review's overall best hardware product for 1995. Very few people have heard of the company that sentence describes. Advanced Logic Research sold PCs out of Irvine, California, in the same market as Packard Bell and Dell, and it kept quietly shipping symmetric multiprocessing boxes that the expensive workstation vendors were supposed to own.

Gene Lu founded it in 1984. Its own last annual report puts it that plainly, "founded in 1984", with no month attached, and the company never seems to have printed a founding day. By 1989 the Los Angeles Times had Lu at thirty-five, running a company in which the Singapore trading house Wearnes Brothers held a majority stake and Lu himself held about a quarter. It went public on Nasdaq under AALR, sold almost everything through distributors rather than stores, and spent the early nineties getting badly hurt.

The hurt is right there in the five-year table of the fiscal 1996 filing. Net sales were $206.8 million in fiscal 1992, then $169.3 million in fiscal 1993 with a net loss of $10.6 million. Three years later the company earned $10.6 million on $217.9 million of sales, which is the 1993 loss with the sign reversed and the best year ALR ever had. This was an American server business sold through American resellers to American corporate buyers, so it never came anywhere near a Turkish desktop; the machines I knew in 1998 were single-socket beige boxes with a Pentium in them, assembled down the road.

~ the dossier ~

~ the sockets ~

What ALR actually sold by 1996 was a ladder. The Revolution MP II took Pentiums, the Q-SMP took up to four of them in a fully symmetrical arrangement with thirteen bays and ten slots, the Dual6 took two 200-MHz Pentium Pros in fourteen bays, and the Quad6 took four Pentium Pros in a chassis with fifteen expansion slots. All three of the top boxes were also sold rack-mounted. The company that had been losing money on cheap desktops in 1993 was, by 1996, shipping machines whose average selling price had climbed to $2,199 from $1,673 two years earlier, because it had stopped trying to win on price.

512 people worked there on 30 September 1996. Of those, 267 were in manufacturing against 42 in engineering and development, a ratio that tells you ALR built things more than it invented them. The reseller channel was 61 percent of sales that year, down from 69 percent two years before, moved through Gates/Arrow, Tech Data and one regional distributor.

~ the tender ~

Gateway 2000 and ALR signed a merger agreement on 19 June 1997, and that is the date Wikipedia's infobox still gives as the day ALR ceased to exist. It is the announcement. The machinery took another five weeks. Gateway set up a Delaware shell called Deuce Acquisition Corporation, filed its tender offer statement on 24 June, and offered $15.50 a share in cash.

The offer expired at midnight New York time on Tuesday 22 July 1997. 12,361,608 shares came in, which was 97.56 percent of the 12,671,338 outstanding, a number high enough that the holdouts were a rounding error. Gateway's own quarterly filing records the close on 23 July 1997 at a purchase price of $191,465,424. ALR signed its deregistration notice two days after that.

~ the brand gateway kept ~

Ted Waitt said he was buying immediate access to established server technology, and he was not being coy about it. Gateway's annual report for that year states that ALR continued to market under its own name and that Gateway's servers used ALR's four-way and six-way SMP work. A year later the filing was still advertising "Gateway ALR branded servers". The name outlived the company by at least seventeen months, which is longer than most acquired brands get, and then it went quiet without anybody announcing anything. Gateway wrote off about $59.7 million of in-process research and development against ALR and the Amiga assets it had picked up in the same period, which is the sort of accounting entry that reads, years later, like a receipt for two different graves.

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