Future Domain

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

~ the obituary ~

Jack A. Allweiss had designed large mainframe systems at Burroughs before he started his own company in Tustin, California in 1982. For the first four years it was called Pacific Management & Engineering and it was one person doing design consultancy for bigger hardware firms. Then he decided to build and sell boards of his own instead, and the company took the name it died under.

The first product was the TMC-820, an inexpensive 8-bit SCSI host adapter for the IBM PC, out in early 1986. Its selling point was that it had no jumpers on it. Everything was configured in firmware with drivers supplied on a floppy, which in 1986 was close to a radical position, because the standard experience of adding a card to a PC involved a folded diagram and a pair of tweezers. Later that year the TMC-870 added support for 5.25-inch floppy drives, so one card could replace two.

SCSI at that point was a difficult standard with a reputation to match. Adaptec and NCR had been in the field first. What set Future Domain apart was less the silicon than the company's willingness to go and work with the people writing device drivers and operating systems, rather than shipping a chip and leaving the vendor to figure out the software. By 1988 it was selling its own custom LSI parts to motherboard makers and system builders, and in 1990 it produced the first single-chip SCSI-2 host adapter.

~ the case file ~

~ the card in the kit ~

If you bought a multimedia upgrade kit in the early 1990s, the kind sold in a box with a CD-ROM drive and a sound card in it, there is a good chance the controller said Future Domain. The TMC-840 was the cheap one, already slow for its era because of the 8-bit data path, and it was everywhere for exactly that reason. The company also shipped a driver utility called PowerSCSI! from 1993 and put it on its own BBS for free. A Computer Shopper reviewer wrote that it "makes SCSI what the standard has always promised to be", which for a cheap controller card was a good review to have.

My own first modem was in 1998, by which time this company had been inside Adaptec for three years and the name on the card meant nothing to anyone buying a PC. Component vendors usually end up here. The part outlives the brand by years, sitting in machines that keep working, and the silkscreen on the board goes on saying a name that no longer belongs to anyone.

~ the quiet monopoly ~

The business got large without ever becoming visible. Inc. ranked it the 187th fastest-growing private company in the United States in 1990, the year it moved from Tustin to Irvine. About 40 percent of its customers were overseas, which cushioned it through the recession that hurt its domestic rivals. Revenue was projected at $15 million for 1992 and by 1993 it had shipped a million and a half host adapters.

Then it started absorbing its competition. In early 1992 it bought Western Digital's entire SCSI host adapter line, the patents and the trademarks and the customer base and the leftover inventory. In 1993 it signed with IBM as the exclusive supplier of SCSI host adapters across its PS/2 and PS/ValuePoint multimedia machines. In 1994 it was leading a specification consortium that included Western Digital and Seagate. A company that had been one man in 1982 was setting the terms for how PCs reached their disks.

~ thirteen july ~

Adaptec bought all of the outstanding stock on 13 July 1995 for $25 million in cash. The date comes from Adaptec's own quarterly filing for that period, where it sits in a list of things that happened after the quarter closed. Eight days earlier Adaptec had paid $3 million for Trillium Research, and thirteen days later it agreed to buy Incat Systems. Future Domain was one line in a shopping trip.

Secondhand sources have put the closing at the end of July 1995 and at some point in 1996, and the Adaptec filing settles both. Twenty-five million dollars for the company that had taken the SCSI card from a jumper-covered expert tool to something you could sell in a retail box. Adaptec had been in that market first and had been beaten in it, and it got the market back by writing a check.

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