CalComp

~ the eulogy ~

CalComp was founded in Anaheim in 1959 as California Computer Products and shipped the 565 drum plotter the same year, one of the first computer graphics output devices anyone sold. The drum was eleven inches wide. IBM resold the machine as the IBM 1627, which is the badge a good many of its users saw, and a wider model with a thirty-inch drum followed.

Ten years later the company was making about 80 percent of the plotters in the world. That number deserves a moment. A pen on a moving arm over a turning drum was how a computer drew anything, and through the sixties that pen was usually CalComp's. The company built IBM plug-compatible storage alongside the plotters, disk products running from 2311 equivalents up to 3350 equivalents, plus a tape drive that stood in for the 3420.

The pen plotter had become a photograph in somebody's slides well before I got near a university lab, where large-format output meant an inkjet. The name was still in circulation by then, because it had been handed along twice: to Sanders Associates in 1980, then to Lockheed in 1986 when Lockheed bought Sanders for $1.2 billion and kept CalComp as a brand.

~ the dossier ~

~ the letter of 23 december ~

In 1996 Lockheed Martin put CalComp and Summagraphics together in a reverse takeover, and the result was a public company called CalComp Technology, Inc., roughly 85 percent owned by Lockheed Martin. The arrangement lasted two years. On 23 December 1998 Lockheed Martin wrote to say that it would not increase the credit available beyond the $43 million already drawn, and offered instead to fund a non-bankruptcy orderly shutdown.

Nobody filed for bankruptcy here. The parent paid to have its own subsidiary taken apart in an orderly way, which is an unusual finish for a company this size. CalComp said it would accept on 28 December, the directors approved a shutdown plan on 14 January 1999, and it was announced on the 15th. Nasdaq delisted the stock on 27 January. Manufacturing and selling stopped. By 30 April the company had terminated 433 employees, 84 percent of its domestic workforce, and on 29 April the board adopted a Plan of Complete Liquidation and Dissolution. Lockheed Martin signed its written consent to that plan on 12 May 1999, which was the only vote that counted.

~ crystaljet ~

What CalComp Technology had been betting on at the end was CrystalJet, a large-format inkjet of its own design. The dissolution filing explains the failure in the flat language these documents use: profitability depended on production volumes and market acceptance greater than could reasonably be anticipated in the near term, and reaching them would have required new capital the company was unable to obtain. There was a $72 million non-cash impairment charge in the fourth quarter, and a further $40.1 million written off against long-lived assets and goodwill.

A company that had owned the plotter market in 1969 spent 1998 trying to break into a large-format inkjet market that already had an incumbent, using money borrowed from its own parent.

~ five pieces and a brand name ~

The shutdown was substantially complete in July 1999 and the product lines left separately. Technical services and spare parts went to CalGraph Technology Services. The TechJet 5500 large-format printer went to CalComp Graphics. Digitizers and tablets went to GTCO CalComp. Film imaging systems went to EcoPro Imaging, now part of OYO Instruments, and the cutter and sign-maker products went to Westcomp.

GTCO CalComp is why the name kept turning up in catalogs for years with nothing left behind it, printed on digitizing tablets instead of plotters. The 565 itself is a museum object now. The Anaheim operation that once built eight out of every ten plotters on earth was closed out by a defense contractor's finance department over a credit line of $43 million.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »