Calma

~ the obit ~

Calma Company was incorporated in California on 13 November 1963 by Calvin and Irma Louise Hefte, and for its first years it sold digitizers: tables that turned a drawing into coordinates a computer could hold. Around 1969 it started building a graphics system on a minicomputer instead. The push came from Josef Sukonick, a mathematics PhD out of MIT who had worked in the CAD group at Fairchild Semiconductor a few streets away in Sunnyvale, and he built most of the thing himself. The first system shipped to Intel late in 1971, and it was called GDS, for Graphic Design System.

By August 1976 there were 121 GDS installations at 70 companies, 43 of them outside the United States. GDS II replaced it in 1978 with a 32-bit database, running on Data General's Nova and Eclipse minicomputers, and by late 1980 there were 171 of those installed. A typical seat that year had a 300 MB disk and up to four screens, and cost more than half a million dollars in the money of the day. These were not machines anybody bought by accident.

Calma was dead five years before I owned a modem, and no teenager in Turkey was getting near one of these regardless: a GDS II seat cost more than an apartment in Ankara at the time, and the customer list was semiconductor companies and nobody else. What earns it a place here is narrower and stranger than the company itself. The chips I now write computer vision code for were handed to their fabs, for the most part, in a file format this company published in 1978.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the format ~

GDS II Stream Format was the way one Calma system gave its mask data to another. It became the de facto standard for exchanging integrated circuit layouts, and it kept being that long after the last Calma machine was scrapped. By 2008 the phrase "GDSII" in industry speech meant the file, not the computer, and EDA vendors were selling their tool chains as running "from RTL to GDSII" without any idea left in the sentence that RTL was a concept and GDSII had been a product.

Money followed the same shape. By 1983 GDS II and the drafting package DDM between them accounted for 60 percent of Calma's revenue, which is a narrow base for a company that size. DDM arrived in 1977 as Design Drafting and Manufacturing and grew an architectural version called Dimension III. It was still one of the ten best selling CAD packages in the mid eighties.

~ how it changed hands ~

Calma never had a public stock offering. United Telecommunications of Kansas City bought it in 1978 for 17 million dollars in stock, with a prospectus dated 16 August and a special shareholder meeting on the 31st, and folded it into United Computing Systems. In December 1980 United agreed to sell it on to General Electric for 110 million dollars plus another 60 million contingent on five years of profits, and that closed on 1 April 1981. GE spent heavily on buildings, including 108,000 square feet near Dublin that had originally been put up for Trilogy Systems. In 1987 the company turned 180 million dollars of revenue into a 20 million dollar loss with 900 people still on the payroll, down from 1,400 five years earlier.

~ what outlived the company ~

In April 1988 GE sold the electronics business to Valid Logic Systems. The mechanical and architectural remainder went to Prime Computer in a sale completed in January 1989, Prime having just taken Computervision by force, which was a tidy ending given that Computervision had sued Calma back in February 1977 over five hired engineers in San Diego. Valid went to Cadence in 1991 and Computervision went to Parametric Technology in 1998. Nothing named Calma came out of either chain.

What this company is remembered for is the one asset it could not keep. A file format spreads by being read, and every program that learned to read GDS II made Calma's machines slightly less necessary.

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