Applicon

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

~ the goodbye ~

Four PhDs out of MIT Lincoln Laboratory incorporated the company in Burlington, Massachusetts in 1969 as Analytics, Inc. The name was already taken, so they contracted the word application into Applicon and kept that instead. Gary Hornbuckle was president and Harry Lee chairman, with Richard Spann running sales and Fontaine Richardson running product development. W. R. Grace lent them money that year and then bought a sixth of the company for $400,000.

Revenue was about half a million dollars in 1971 and $9.5 million by fiscal 1975. General Electric put money in around 1972 and ended up holding almost 28 percent. It offered $20 a share for the rest and was turned down. Then it went off and bought Calma instead. Applicon went public in mid-1980 off a prospectus dated 18 June and reported $50.8 million of revenue for that fiscal year, then sold another 260,000 shares at $33 once GE had cleared out. Schlumberger announced it was buying the whole thing on 7 September 1981 in a stock deal worth around $232 million.

Under Schlumberger the business was merged with MDSI in July 1985 and the headquarters moved to Ann Arbor. That was also the year headcount went from about 1,300 to about 600. Revenue still touched roughly $148 million in 1985, seventh in an industry Applicon had once been second in, behind only Computervision. In early 1988 the Billerica manufacturing plant was sold off to a management group under Francis Donlan, which renamed it Manufacturing Solutions.

Then the long slide. Gores Enterprises bought the company in a deal announced on 28 September 1993, by which point revenue was about $70 million, and had recovered its purchase cost by early 1996. Revenue was around $40 million in 1998 and under $30 million the next year. In August 1999 Unigraphics Solutions bought it for reportedly under $10 million, shipped one more release of the Bravo flagship as version 8.0, and moved the customers onto Unigraphics or Solid Edge.

~ the chronicle ~

~ it started with photomasks ~

The first business was not mechanical design. It was integrated circuit photomask layout, a job that in 1969 meant drawing rectangles by hand and getting them photographically reduced, and the product that came of it was called Design Assistant, running on a PDP-11 as the DA 700. An earlier generation ran on an IBM 1130 with Computek terminals and sold eight or ten units. The first customer was Matsushita.

That genealogy is why the company matters more than its revenue line suggests. The electronic design tools I have worked near are descendants of exactly this: interactive graphics on a minicomputer, sold at a system price, to engineers who had previously used a drafting table. When I eventually came near this class of tool, the survivors were a handful of enormous suites, and Applicon was already an entry inside somebody else's acquisition history.

~ the name went off and came back on ~

In November 1987 Schlumberger dropped the Applicon name and ran the business as Schlumberger CAD/CAM. On 16 September 1992 it reversed the decision and the company was called Applicon again. Five years off the market under a different label, then back again.

The restored name then outlived its usefulness slowly. Applicon Holdings bought HoSoft GmbH and Computer Design, Inc. in January 1996 under the Gores ownership, and the installed base was still substantial at the end: around 5,000 customers and 40,000 seats by 1998, against roughly 1,500 systems in the early 1980s. A large installed base and shrinking revenue is a maintenance business, and a maintenance business is what UGS paid under ten million dollars for.

~ what the record gets wrong ~

English Wikipedia says the end of Applicon came in 1989, when it partnered with PTC. The sentence carries a citation-needed tag and it feeds the 1989 disestablishment category, which is how the date travels. Dave Weisberg's chapter on the company contradicts it twice over. The name was dropped in 1987 rather than 1989, then revived in 1992 and used until 1999. The PTC arrangement was a reseller deal for Pro/ENGINEER signed around 1990 or 1991, which means there was no 1989 partnership there to end anything.

What no source gives is the day the name was actually retired after UGS bought it. There is no press release announcing that a thirty-year-old CAD brand was done, because by August 1999 nobody needed telling. The company's old domain now serves an unrelated Nordic software firm, which has held it since at least 2017.

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