Leading Edge

~ the obituary ~

I missed this one by a year at the near end and by more than a decade at the far end. Leading Edge was finished as a going concern in 1997 and my first modem connection was in 1998, so there is no point at which the two overlap. The brand had no presence in Turkey at any stage of its life either. Everything below is reconstruction.

The company started in Canton, Massachusetts in 1980 selling the things that sit near a computer rather than the computer itself. Michael and Thomas Shane sold printer ribbons and floppy disks under the Elephant Memory Systems name, whose entire advertising position was that an elephant never forgets. Selling a blank disk on the promise that it will not lose your work is an accurate read of what people were frightened of in 1981.

The machine came later. The Leading Edge Model D was an IBM PC compatible built by Daewoo in South Korea, the first Korean-made PC sold in the United States, and it came with two floppy drives, 256K of memory and a monochrome monitor for $1,495 at a moment when the equivalent IBM cost roughly twice that. The dates in circulation disagree, with the machine's own record putting the launch in July 1985 and the company's putting the selling year at 1986. It moved 125,000 units in thirteen months and the price then dropped to $1,295.

Reviewers liked it more than they had planned to. The point of the Model D was never that it was clever. It was that a machine assembled in Korea by a conglomerate better known for ships and cars could match the American original at half the money, and that nothing in IBM's design was hard to copy.

Everyone learned that at once. By 1989 the company was in Chapter 11, carrying the legal costs of a fight with Mitsubishi, and Daewoo, which had been building the hardware all along, took it over. Al Agbay was brought in that January, paid dealers back about 16 million dollars and pushed annual revenue past 250 million inside three years. It still sold 185,000 PCs in 1994. Then 1995 ran 90,000 units in the first half and almost none in the second. Daewoo sold the company to Manuhold Investment AG of Switzerland that October and by 1997 the name was gone.

The reason this one is worth a grave from where I am sitting is that Leading Edge won its argument and died of it. A personal computer is a commodity anybody can assemble out of parts bought elsewhere, and the badge on the front is worth whatever the buyer says it is worth, which is generally nothing. That is how the entire industry works now, including the corner of it I grew up buying from. The company that proved it first did not last long enough to watch.

~ the case file ~

~ the model d ~

The specification was ordinary and the number underneath it was not. An 8088, 256K, two 5.25 inch drives, a monitor included rather than sold separately, and a keyboard people were willing to type on all day. An IBM PC configured to do the same work came to something near three thousand dollars. Leading Edge answered with fifteen hundred and the screen in the box.

What made it a phenomenon rather than a bargain was that it worked. Compatibility was the whole risk of buying a clone in 1986, and this one ran what the IBM ran. Once a hundred thousand American households had established that, the question stopped being whether to buy a clone and became which clone to buy. That is a far worse question for the company that asked it first.

~ what daewoo bought ~

Daewoo was already making the machines, so buying the wreck of its own customer in 1989 was mostly about keeping the American distribution channel open. For a few years it worked. Agbay's rescue was a real one, and paying dealers back after a bankruptcy is not standard behavior, so the brand got several more years of shelf space than it had earned.

What none of that bought was a reason for the brand to exist. Compaq cut prices in 1992 and the whole clone tier had to follow it down. By the time Daewoo handed the company to a Swiss investor in 1995, Leading Edge was a name on a box being filled with the same parts as every other box. The elephant was the only piece of it anybody could still describe, and the elephant had never been a computer.

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