Kraft Systems

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

~ the eulogy ~

Phil Kraft built radio controls for model airplanes in a Pasadena garage from 1962. He was a competition flyer himself, good enough that the gear got bought because he used it, and the business grew the way that kind of business does: out of the garage to an industrial building in South El Monte in 1964, then onto six and a half acres in Vista, California, bought in February 1968, with a 15,000 square foot headquarters finished by the January after. His mother Virginia was the comptroller and ran the office. Revenue was around $660,000 in 1967 and $2 million the next year, by which point there were eighty people working there.

The strange credits come from this period. Kraft built the model helicopters and the radio system used for the aerial sequences in The Towering Inferno in 1974, and made special transceivers for The Muppet Show. The scale is easiest to see in 1970, when Kraft sold $2.5 million against a model-aircraft industry reporting $15 million in total, so roughly one dollar in six spent on the hobby that year went through Vista. By 1977 the plant was turning out 400 radio-control transmitters a week with 150 workers.

None of which I was alive for. Kraft's computer-joystick peak lands in 1983 and the company was gone by late 1994, which is four years before I first dialed a modem in Turkey. By then a joystick in a Turkish shop was an unbranded thing in a blister pack, and the premium American sticks of the Apple II years had never had a route to that market in the first place.

~ the dossier ~

~ the second hand controller ~

What happened around 1981 is the part worth recording, because it was not a pivot so much as a recognition. A model-aircraft transmitter is two gimballed sticks reporting their position continuously to a receiver. A computer joystick is one gimballed stick reporting its position to a game port. Kraft had been manufacturing precision potentiometers on springs for twenty years, and the personal computer turned out to need exactly that, in volume, from somebody who already knew how to build it.

The company started with sticks for what was then called the graphical computer workstation market in 1981, and brought out the Premium line for home computers in 1982, advertised in InfoWorld that June. It was among the first manufacturers of joysticks for the IBM PC, and in 1984 it supplied the sticks for the IBM PCjr. Its reputation among Apple II owners was the reputation of the RC gear transplanted: expensive and repairable, in a market filling up with sealed plastic.

~ the Vista years ~

The numbers from the computer era are better than the model-airplane ones. By the end of 1983 Kraft had sold $12 million worth of joysticks and was the third-largest employer in Vista with 100 workers, as well as the most profitable company in the town. Headcount across the whole business had peaked at 250 in 1981 and come down to 200 the following year, which suggests the joystick line was growing while something else shrank.

Ownership had changed long before any of this. Carlisle Corporation of Cincinnati announced it was buying the company in June 1972, and then left it alone: Kraft ran as an independently managed subsidiary with Phil Kraft as its president for the rest of its life. That is an unusual outcome for a 1970s conglomerate acquisition and it is probably why the company kept its character for another two decades. By 1990 some manufacturing had moved to East Asia, which is the first sign in the record that the cost structure had stopped working.

~ what MicroSpeed bought ~

In 1994 MicroSpeed, Inc. of Fremont, California, a maker of keyboards and trackballs, acquired Kraft Systems' intellectual property for an undisclosed sum. Newsbytes reported it on 23 September 1994 under a headline about MicroSpeed acquiring the Kraft joystick product line, and that is the only date anywhere near this ending, which is why the grave is filed at September rather than on a day.

The wording in the record matters: what was sold was the intellectual property, and the effect was to end Kraft as a manufacturing concern. A buyer who wants a factory buys the factory. MicroSpeed wanted the designs and the name on them, and the plant in Vista that had been making radio gear since 1969 was not part of the transaction. Philip Kraft died in 2006. kraftsystems.com today serves a stray photograph and a block of hidden pharmacy spam links, which is what happens to a lapsed domain with thirty years of inbound links still pointing at it.

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