Bunker Ramo Corporation

~ the obituary ~

Bunker Ramo was formed in January 1964 as a joint venture between Martin Marietta and Thompson Ramo Wooldridge, which everyone already called TRW. It took its name from the two men who set it up, George M. Bunker of Martin Marietta and Simon Ramo of TRW, and it absorbed the holdings of the Teleregister Corporation, which built the electromechanical quotation boards that brokerage offices watched. That inheritance decided what the company became.

The first products were military. A transistorized computer called the BR-133 appeared in 1964 and went into service under the designation AN/UYK-3. Alongside it the company built video display terminals and sold them to banks and brokerages, which in the middle sixties was a small specialist market and within five years was not.

In 1967 the connector manufacturer Amphenol was fighting off a takeover. Solitron Devices had accumulated a quarter of its shares, a merger with Sangamo Electric had collapsed, and Amphenol's president had told reporters that someone had put a listening device in his home telephone. Before 1967 was out, Amphenol agreed to merge with Bunker Ramo instead. The combined company took the Bunker Ramo name, Amphenol's Matthew Devine became its chief executive, and in 1969 it reached number 338 on the Fortune 500.

~ the case file ~

~ february 1971 ~

The National Association of Securities Dealers wanted an automated quotation system to replace the paper sheets that dealers in unlisted stocks had been passing around. Bunker Ramo got the contract and ran the central data center out of Trumbull. The system went live on 8 February 1971 under the name National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations, which nobody has said in full since.

Accounts of the first day disagree on the numbers, some giving quotes on three thousand securities to a thousand brokerage firms and others putting it at twenty five hundred securities and around five hundred market makers. What they agree on is the shape: it displayed prices and did not execute anything. A dealer still had to pick up a telephone. The exchange that is now a global brand with a tower in Times Square began as a quote feed running on hardware from a defense contractor in Connecticut.

~ the connectors paid for it ~

It is tempting to read Bunker Ramo as a computer company with a sideline. The accounts say the reverse: through the 1970s the Amphenol components group supplied as much as seventy percent of the company's income, and the computers lived off it. Information Systems was one division of five. Another was Borg Textiles, because the Amphenol that merged in had itself merged with the George W. Borg Corporation back in 1958, which is how a firm that built the first NASDAQ also spent the seventies making automobile clocks.

The connector business was not safe either. Amphenol's income fell from $23.6 million in 1974 to $3.7 million in 1975 as rivals took share, and a reorganization under president George S. Trimble pulled all the connector lines into one group. The clocks and some of the textiles were cut. By 1980 the company earned $27.2 million on revenues of $467.6 million against only $74 million of debt.

~ the takeover years ~

Fairchild Industries moved first. In 1979 it bought the twenty one percent of Bunker Ramo that Martin Marietta still held and offered $96 million for the rest, and the merger did not happen. United States Filter made approaches too. In October 1980 Duane L. Burnham took over as president and chief executive, and under him the company went shopping for acquisitions on the theory that a larger company negotiates a better price when it is eventually sold.

It was sold in May 1981. Allied Corp, a diversified chemical manufacturer, agreed to pay $358 million. The Bunker Ramo name went no further. The components operation continued inside Allied, and later Allied-Signal, under the name Amphenol Products that it had carried before 1967.

~ what kept the name ~

All of it was over by 1981, in a business that sold to banks and defense buyers and never once to a household, so there is no domestic memory here to recover, mine or anyone else's. Allied offered Amphenol for sale in the mid eighties, a leveraged buyout took it in 1987, and it is listed today with a market value in the tens of billions. NASDAQ outgrew the quote feed and became an exchange. The name that linked the two of them lasted seventeen years and survives as a wordmark in a black rounded rectangle, which is all anyone ever recovers of a company that sold to engineers.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »