Monorail Inc.

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

~ the goodbye ~

H. Douglas Johns had been president of Compaq's personal computer division and walked away in 1993, saying the hours were too long. Two years later he registered Monorail Inc. in Marietta, Georgia, on 2 November 1995, with two of his old Compaq colleagues, David Hocker and Nicholas Forlenza. He hired a former SunTrust banker named James Clarke as finance chief and a marketing man named Andrew Watson, and by 1996 the whole operation was forty people.

It was not a computer company in any sense a factory would recognize. Phelps Technologies built the machines. FedEx moved them. Complex Plastics in Boulder molded the case, Colorado Electronic Hardware supplied the components, NMB Technologies made the keyboard, and Sharp sold them the screen. Monorail itself owned the drawings and the phone number. Fast Company ran a profile in December 1997 under the headline "This 'Virtual' Company Is for Real," which tells you how unusual the arrangement still looked.

The product reached stores in late November 1996 at a suggested price of $999. It was an all-in-one: a 10.4-inch passive-matrix panel lifted out of the laptop supply chain, a 75 MHz AMD K5 behind it, roughly eighty percent the footprint of a desktop tower and about twice the weight of a notebook. A December follow-up put a 200 MHz Pentium in the same shell. Doubling the stock 8 MB of memory and adding 512 KB of video memory cost another $199 plus shipping. The warranty ran a year, but only the first ninety days covered labor, and opening the case ended it.

In 1996 I was twelve and two years away from my first modem. The Monorail was a thing you walked past in a big-box American electronics store, which is a sentence with no Turkish translation. It also looked, five years early, quite a lot like the arm-and-screen Macintosh that Apple would ship in 2002 to considerable applause.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the box came first ~

The industrial design brief was a shipping specification. FedEx had a standard carton at 19 by 19 by 9.5 inches, and the machine was drawn to live inside it, because a company with no warehouse pays for every oversized package it sends. Everything downstream followed from that constraint, starting with a flat panel where a cathode ray tube belonged.

~ dellpaq ~

Watson called the strategy Dellpaq. The idea was to carry the thin inventory of a build-to-order seller like Dell or Gateway while keeping the thing customers trusted about Compaq, which was a physical box on a retail shelf you could put your hands on. CompUSA agreed to stock it in the fall of 1996 and it became one of the chain's five best-selling computers within two months. Circuit City and Egghead picked it up afterward, and distributors including Ingram Micro and Tech Data carried it out to resellers.

The margin was thin by design and it did not survive contact with 1997. Once every major maker had a sub-$1000 desktop, the one reason to buy a Monorail evaporated. A company officer, Roy Edwards, put it plainly: the market fell apart at the same moment the product hit it, and competition increased. Phelps Technologies was carrying millions in debt by then. Monorail fired it in January 1998 and brought in Synnex; Phelps filed Chapter 11 the next month. The all-in-one was discontinued around March 1998, and what followed were ordinary towers built by SCI Systems in Huntsville, Alabama, sold under a "Monorail NPC" label that nobody remembers.

~ what the registry says ~

The company renamed itself Monorail Computer Corporation in 1998 and kept a pulse for seven more years selling machines with nothing distinctive about them. Johns left in 2002 to run worldwide operations at Internet Security Systems, and in 2009 he turned up as chief executive of Nivis, a wireless sensor firm in Atlanta.

The date on the headstone, 9 July 2005, comes from the Georgia Corporations Division rather than from any announcement, which is the usual way these things actually finish. The interesting death happened in March 1998, when the computer stopped being made. Everything after that was paperwork catching up with a decision the market had already taken.

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