Amdek

~ the obituary ~

Amdek started under a different name and for a different reason. Go Sugiura, born in Osaka in 1936, had spent the 1960s importing steel into Venezuela and the early 1970s representing a Japanese semiconductor maker in the United States, and he incorporated Leedex in 1977 as a side business bringing in car radio parts. A manufacturer in Ohio already trading as Leedex threatened to sue over the name, so he changed it. Ikutaro Kakehashi of Roland later wrote that Amdek stood for Analog, Music, Digital, Electronics and Kits. Sugiura told an interviewer in 1984 that he had picked the syllables at random.

The monitor business came out of a conversation with Ted McCracken, a computer science professor at the University of Missouri who had been the first dealer in the state to import the Apple II. Sugiura had seen a monochrome data terminal in Taiwan that he liked the look of. McCracken suggested gutting it and selling the tube as a composite monitor, because Apple II owners had almost nothing to plug into. In the summer of 1978 Sugiura paid $375 for half a booth at a Texas computer show and put one sample on the end of the table. Later that year he ordered 500 units and priced them at $129, fifty dollars under the only other aftermarket monitor on sale.

Amdek is a name I have only read, never said out loud. The company's independent life ended in January 1986, at which point I was two, and the badge it left behind had already turned into a commodity part by the time anyone around me owned a screen of any kind. What survives is the thing PC World noticed in 1994, looking back: for most of the early 1980s, the person who bought a monitor separately bought this one, and then forgot they had.

~ the case file ~

~ half a booth in texas ~

By 1981 the company was moving between 2,000 and 3,000 monochrome monitors a month. That is a strange number for a business with no engineering department to speak of, selling a product that was somebody else's terminal with the brains taken out. The microcomputer makers of the late 1970s sold you a box and left the display as your problem, and Amdek solved that problem cheaply and in volume, in a shade of beige that matched almost anything.

Roland's Taiwanese subsidiary took a majority stake in the early 1980s and spent a while selling guitar pedal kits under the Amdek name, which is why the brand turns up in two completely separate hobbies. Roland let the stake go in 1983. That year Amdek posted $50 million in sales with 65 people on the payroll, headquartered in Elk Grove Village with branch offices in Dallas and Costa Mesa.

~ the thousand dollar color tube ~

The color monitor arrived in 1981, built on a Hitachi chassis with an adapter board McCracken designed so it would work with an Apple II. It cost around $1,000, which was a lot against the rest of the catalog. What made it a hit was IBM: for the first eighteen months of the IBM Personal Computer's life, IBM offered no color display option at all. Anyone who wanted color on a PC had to go outside, and outside was mostly Amdek. The company sold over 600,000 of them by 1984.

~ the stock swap ~

1985 was the first bad year, and Sugiura blamed it partly on products the company had no business making. Plotters and speakers had come and gone. The press picked up rumors that Micro-Term of Fenton, Missouri, or an unnamed Japanese electronics firm was circling, and the company denied them. In January 1986 Wyse Technology, a San Jose terminal maker, agreed to buy Amdek Corporation for $7.2 million in a stock swap. The terms were later revalued at $8.5 million in shares.

Wyse installed H. L. "Sparky" Sparks, formerly of IBM, as president of the Amdek division in 1987, and under him the badge went onto whole computers for the first time, in a line of PC compatibles running from the 8088 up to the 386. Sparks resigned in 1988 citing differences with Wyse management, and Michael P. Richman took over. The division released very little for the next six years.

~ nine more years of the name ~

The sentence that sits at the top of every account of this company comes from a 1994 PC World review: "Amdek was once the name in PC monitors. Chances are the monochrome monitors most of us used once carried the Amdek label." The same piece notes that the few products Wyse had introduced under the badge were out of step with where monitors had gone. Wyse staged a comeback that year with one monochrome model and three color ones carrying EPA Energy Star compliance, and kept selling Amdek monitors until at least 1995.

Then the name went quiet, without an announcement anybody wrote down. There is no shutdown date for the brand, only a last sighting. Somebody holds amdek.com and does nothing with it. The Internet Archive's copy from September 2024 reads, in full, "Coming soon."

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