Northgate Computer Systems

~ the goodbye ~

I found Northgate backwards, through a keyboard, about twenty years after the company that built it had stopped existing. That is the normal route now. Somebody in a mechanical keyboard thread posts a photo of an OmniKey, somebody else explains what an Alps switch is, and the beige computer the thing was originally sold with never comes up because nobody wants that part.

Arthur Lazere started the company in Eden Prairie, Minnesota in 1987, into the same mail-order market that Dell, Gateway, Zeos and a dozen others were fighting over. The business ran the way all of them ran: a full page in an American computer magazine, a specification, a price, a phone number at the bottom. Northgate did 386 systems from 1989 and 486 systems in 1990, and for about three years it was a real competitor.

Then it came apart quickly. The September 1993 quarter was heavily loss-making, and the landlord in Eden Prairie wanted a 1.5 million dollar letter of credit to continue the lease, granting occupancy only through 7 November 1993. Marjac Investments had already taken 51 percent of the company in 1992, and merger talks with Everex went nowhere. On 3 August 1994 several trade creditors filed an involuntary Chapter 7 petition. The company converted it voluntarily to Chapter 11 on 21 September, and by December 1995 the reorganization was paying 19 cents on the dollar against 16 million dollars of unsecured debt.

The computers were never going to mean anything to me. What did travel, eventually, is the argument about the keyboard, and that argument is one I can join, because I have spent my working life at one. The OmniKey is in the same conversation as the IBM Model M for the same reason: it was made by people who assumed the buyer would be pressing those keys for eight hours a day for years. That assumption stopped being made about ten minutes after Northgate died, and it took the industry roughly two decades to notice it had lost something.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the omnikey ~

The OmniKey line ran on Alps mechanical switches with tactile feedback, in an era when the rest of the market was already migrating to rubber domes to save a few dollars per unit. Northgate went further than the switch choice. The Ultra model let you move the function keys between the left side and the top row, and let you swap the physical positions of Caps Lock and Control, which is a thing programmers and typists had been complaining about since IBM moved them in 1986.

It worked well enough that people bought the keyboard without the computer. A Dell or a Gateway owner would order a bare OmniKey from Northgate's own catalog because whatever came in the box with their machine was worse. That is a strange commercial position: your accessory has better brand equity than your product.

~ how it fell over ~

Mail order in the early nineties was a volume business with almost no margin, and the winner was whoever could hold the least inventory while shipping the most units. Dell was better at that than everybody. Gateway was better funded. Northgate was in a market where being good at the product was not the variable being optimized, and the 1993 numbers show what happens to a company in that position when demand shifts by one quarter.

The lease detail is the one worth keeping. A landlord asking for a 1.5 million dollar letter of credit is a landlord who has read your financials and decided you are not going to be here next year. He was right by about nine months.

~ what happened to the name ~

Lan Plus bought Northgate in 1997. That entity merged with Mcglen and operated as Northgate Innovations into 2002, rebranded as Digital Lifestyles Group in 2004 chasing the teen PC market, and announced permanent closure on 25 April 2005. None of that had anything to do with the company Lazere ran. It was a trademark being walked around a room.

The keyboards did better. Creative Vision Technologies picked up the line and sold it as Avant, and kept selling it until Ideal System Solutions acquired CVT in 2011. So the OmniKey design was in continuous production for about twenty-four years, seventeen of them after the company whose name is on the badge went into bankruptcy. If you want one now you buy it used, and the ones that turn up still work, because that is what the thing was built for.

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