Convergent Technologies

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

~ the last words ~

In Turkey in the 1980s the name on the front of a computer was the entire public fact about it. Machines arrived through a distributor or through state procurement, and the badge was the identity of the thing. Nobody in a Turkish office asked who had built the box under the Burroughs logo, because there was no reason to imagine the answer was anyone but Burroughs. For a good number of those machines the answer was a company in Silicon Valley called Convergent Technologies, and that was as true in Ankara as it was in Ohio.

Convergent was formed in 1979 by a small group who left Intel and Xerox PARC together: Allen Michels as CEO, Bob Garrow running engineering, Kal Hubler on marketing, Ben Wegbreit designing the operating system. They built networked office workstations at a moment before the IBM PC existed, with their own operating system, CTOS, which handled multiple processors and networking as ordinary features rather than as add-ons. It was a good machine and a good system, and almost nobody was ever told who made it.

The business model was OEM from the start. Convergent designed and manufactured, and other companies put their names on the result and sold it through their own channels. The IWS of 1980 went out as the Burroughs B22 and as the NCR WorkSaver 100. Savin sold the same machine as the Information Station 2000. The AWS of 1981 became the Burroughs B21 and the Prime Producer 100. The NGEN of late 1983 was the B25 to Burroughs customers and the Producer 200 to Prime's. ADP, AT&T, Gould and Mohawk Data Sciences all resold Convergent hardware at one point or another.

It worked. By 1984 the company employed 1,300 people, on the strength of a product line with essentially no consumer recognition. There were experiments outside the model, including the WorkSlate in November 1983, a flat portable with a spreadsheet built into ROM and a microcassette recorder in the side, which was discontinued by the summer of 1984 after selling almost nothing. That one had Convergent's own name on it.

~ the record ~

~ the near miss ~

In March 1986 Convergent arranged to merge with 3Com. The two were complementary on paper, one with the workstations and one with the networking, and the deal was called off at the last moment. It is worth sitting with what that would have been: 3Com spent the following decade becoming one of the largest networking companies in the world, and had that merger closed, the workstation business would have been inside it.

Michels had already gone by then. He left in 1985 with other executives to start Dana Computer, which became Ardent and then Stardent, chasing graphics supercomputers. The founding team was largely out of the building before the ending arrived.

~ the absorption ~

On 8 August 1988 Unisys took over Convergent Technologies for a sum reported at around 351 million dollars, and the shape of that deal is the whole story in one line. Unisys was what you got when Burroughs and Sperry merged in 1986. Burroughs had been Convergent's biggest reseller for most of a decade, selling Convergent machines as B21s and B25s. The customer bought the supplier. There was no takeover battle and no distress, just a company acquiring the factory that had been quietly producing its own product line the entire time.

Convergent became a division inside Unisys and CTOS kept running in banks and offices for years afterward, maintained but not advanced, until Unisys finally let it go. Convergent did not fail. It was bought by the company whose logo had been on the front of its work since 1980, which is the logical end point of a business built on never putting your name on anything. Nine years of hardware and 1,300 people at the peak, and outside the industry the name was never known at all.

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