EduQuest

~ the eulogy ~

American school districts buy computers through a channel that does not exist in most of the world. There are bond issues, approved vendor lists, remarketers who sell only to schools, and purchase orders for fourteen hundred identical machines at once. I went to school in Turkey in exactly the years this company was alive, and nothing about that process touched me. EduQuest was built entirely for the other kind of classroom.

It came out of a division James Elton Dezell Jr. had set up inside IBM in 1982. Dezell was an IBM executive who had been a teacher first, and his Educational Systems group spent a decade selling into schools from inside a corporation whose attention was elsewhere. In 1992 IBM spun it out as EduQuest and made him president of it, with a thousand sales and support people, four hundred of them at the Atlanta headquarters.

The target was Apple, which had owned the American classroom for a decade and had done it with a machine most of those teachers could operate without help. IBM's answer was to stop treating schools as one more corner of the corporate sales territory and build something that only sold to them.

~ the dossier ~

~ the company inside the company ~

For two years the arrangement was a strange one. IBM's own material described EduQuest as a company within a company, and the parent held itself out as little more than a landlord, renting its subsidiary the buildings and the equipment. EduQuest had its own branch offices and its own phone number for schools to call, and IBM announcement letters of the period list EduQuest hardware and EduQuest services in the same document as the rest of the corporation's product line, as though a different firm had written half of it.

That lasted until January 1994, when IBM folded EduQuest back together with its higher-education arm and its corporate training arm under a new umbrella called IBM Education Businesses. EduQuest survived as one of three divisions and kept its name, but it now reported into a structure above it, and the landlord arrangement was over.

~ the machines themselves ~

The hardware is the part worth remembering. EduQuest built on the chassis of the IBM PS/2 Model 25, the all-in-one with the monitor and the computer in a single beige block, and then rebuilt it for an environment that treats equipment the way eleven-year-olds treat equipment. The mouse was physically attached to the machine and its roller ball could not be pried out. A dust shield covered the floppy drive, because classrooms have chalk in the air and chalk is death to a floppy mechanism.

The 1993 line dropped the PS/2 badge and went by Model Thirty through Model Fifty, configurable by the district down to whether the machine had a sound card at all and whether it carried a network card for Token Ring. Model Thirty-five and Model Fifty-Five followed in May 1994 with faster processors. That November the Easton Area School District in Pennsylvania bought 1,418 of them, which gives some sense of what a single order in this business looked like.

Nobody has ever dated the ending to a day. During 1995 EduQuest was renamed IBM K-12 Education, the headquarters moved from Atlanta to Phoenix, and the hardware business stopped. The software kept being sold under the new name for a while. Dezell died in 2000. The machines are in collections now, which is roughly where a computer designed to survive a classroom was always going to end up.

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