Cromemco

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

~ the last words ~

In 1974 Roger Melen was in the New York offices of Popular Electronics when he saw a prototype of the MITS Altair. He changed his return flight to go through Albuquerque and met Ed Roberts, who encouraged him to build add-ons for the machine. Back in California he and Harry Garland, both Stanford graduate students who had been writing construction projects for the magazine since 1970, formed a partnership to do exactly that. They named it after Crothers Memorial Hall, the Stanford dormitory for engineering graduate students where they had started working together.

The first two products were not peripherals in any ordinary sense. The Cyclops ran in the February 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, billed there as the first all-solid-state television camera an experimenter could build, with a MOS photoelement array of 1,024 pixels in a 32 by 32 grid and a kit of semiconductors for $55. It is widely described now as the first digital camera, which is a later framing rather than the one the magazine used. The company is not in that issue at all: the parts list carries only the names of Garland and Melen and a house address on Laurel Lane in Los Altos. The Dazzler followed in February 1976 and put color graphics on a television from an S-100 machine, after a first showing at the Homebrew Computer Club the previous November. Between them came the Bytesaver, a programmable read-only memory card that let a computer do something useful the moment you switched it on rather than after you had keyed in a bootstrap.

The bus got its name on Cromemco's watch. Several manufacturers settled it between them at the Atlantic City convention in August 1976, and the announcement that the Altair hundred-line bus would now be called Standard 100, or S-100, went out in the first issue of Cromemco's own dealer newsletter that October.

Cromemco was incorporated on the last day of 1976 and moved from boards to whole systems with the Z-1, then the Z-2 in 1977, then the System Three in 1978. It wrote two operating systems, CDOS and the Unix-like Cromix, and in 1982 it put a Motorola 68000 on a dual-processor card that kept a Z80 alongside for compatibility. In December 1981 Inc. magazine listed it among the ten fastest-growing privately held companies in the United States. A companion piece the month before was built around the fact that it had never taken a dime from anyone. Garland and Melen owned all of it outright until the sale.

Its peak was 1983 and the figure depends who you ask. The Computer History Museum puts the maximum at 450 employees and $42 million in sales; the account kept by a former employee, which Wikipedia follows, says over 500 people and about $55 million. Both agree on the year, and both agree it had shipped more S-100 systems than anybody else.

~ the record ~

~ who actually bought these ~

The hobbyist origin is misleading about where the money came from. In 1981 the US Air Force Systems Command compared 149 microcomputers to pick one for its Theater Air Control System, and concluded that the equipment offered by Cromemco was the most responsive to the selection criteria. The Air Force went on to deploy six hundred Cromemco systems between 1985 and 1996 as Mission Support Systems for the F-15, F-16 and F-111, with a removable hard disk built to its requirements. They were used in anger during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. The Navy put them on ships and Ohio-class submarines, and used them to generate the spoken output in the Aegis combat information center.

Two other markets were quietly enormous. From 1982 to 1992 every trade at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange was processed by a bank of sixty Cromemco Z-2 machines, each stuffed with eight-port serial cards feeding terminals on the floor, until IBM PS/2s replaced them. And by 1986 more than eighty percent of major-market American television stations were making their news and weather graphics on Cromemco hardware. If you watched a US weather forecast in the mid-eighties you were looking at the output of a Cromemco box from Mountain View. Newsweek reported in 1985 that over 10,000 systems had gone to Chinese universities.

~ newsletter 129 ~

Stan Veit, who ran one of the first computer stores in the United States, wrote the clearest sentence anyone has written about why it ended. The entry of IBM into the personal computer market practically destroyed most of Cromemco's business, he said, and in 1986 the company had massive layoffs because the business had been reduced to system maintenance and parts replacement. Revenue had run from a high around $50 million down to roughly $10 million by early 1987.

Dynatech Corporation was already a large customer through its ColorGraphics Weather Systems subsidiary, which is how a Massachusetts conglomerate came to buy a California microcomputer firm. It bought Cromemco at the end of December 1986 along with four other private companies, and no price was ever disclosed for any of them. Wikipedia's 1987 is the year the trade press caught up: Computer Business Review on 6 January, Computer Systems News under the headline "End of an Era at Cromemco" on the 12th. Garland and Melen stayed through the transition until a new management team was in place, and then left.

The ending is in a Dynatech newsletter. Issue 129, September 1988: Cromemco's name has been changed to reflect its acquisition by Dynatech, and the new name is Dynatech Computer Systems. By March 1989 that entity was announcing multiprocessor 68030 machines under the new badge. A document from around the same time claims over 60,000 installed systems in 66 countries and says the Cromemco label continues to be sold, though the same document describes pruning the low-volume products.

~ vacuum pumps in athens ~

Several things outlived the company. A System One appears in Ghostbusters in 1984 and a System Three has a substantial part in Andrew Bujalski's Computer Chess in 2013. The Smithsonian took a C-10 into the National Museum of American History in 2018. And Roger Sippl, Laura King and Roy Harrington left Cromemco to start Informix.

The strangest survival is the name. The Greek operation began in 1978 as a local outfit called Information and Control Systems, became Cromemco Hellas in 1990 with the German Cromemco company among its shareholders, and simply kept the word. Today cromemco.gr is a live Athens business selling industrial vacuum pumps, central vacuum systems and Siemens automation panels, advertising more than thirty years as a distributor for Elmo Rietschle, under a copyright line carrying this year. It makes no claim on the American company and does not need to. A Stanford dormitory named a microcomputer firm, and fifty years later the word is on vacuum equipment in Greece.

I was four years old when that newsletter went out, so this is a machine I have only met as photographs and other people's stories. The reason it earns a page is the Air Force number. Six hundred boxes were still planning F-15 and F-16 missions in 1996, eight years after the name on them was retired, running an operating system written for a bus some manufacturers agreed on in a conference room in Atlantic City.

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