Ohio Scientific

~ the obit ~

Ohio Scientific Instruments was incorporated in Hiram, Ohio in 1975 by Dale A. Dreisbach, a chairman and professor emeritus of Hiram College's chemistry department, together with Mike and Charity Cheiky, a married couple who had met at the same college. Mike had been director of engineering at the Ohio Nuclear Company in Solon, building medical equipment, while Charity had taught math and computer science at Western Reserve Academy. The three of them put somewhere between five and twenty-five thousand dollars into it and ran it out of a garage, selling electronic teaching aids.

The teaching aids sold badly. A calculator that also taught statistics went nowhere. What moved was the thing Mike had designed because he had used microprocessor-based minicomputers at his day job: the Microcomputer Trainer Board, a bare 6502 board with 128 bytes of RAM and a row of slide switches wired straight to the processor's address and data pins. A quarter-page advertisement in an early issue of Byte brought in a hundred thousand dollars of orders inside a few months. In June 1976 the company logged its first million in revenue.

From there it went up fast enough that the founders could not hold on to it. The Challenger series and the Superboard single-board machines made the company's name among hobbyists, and in 1977 Ohio Scientific became the first company to sell microcomputers with hard disk drives attached. By January 1978 it had outgrown Hiram and moved into a seventy-two-thousand-square-foot former beverage plant in Aurora. Thirty-five employees became a hundred within six months and three hundred by 1980, by which point revenue was eighteen million dollars a year. Charity Cheiky, at the head of a personal computer manufacturer in the mid-1970s, was the first woman to hold that job.

None of this is anything I can claim a memory of. The Aurora factory was padlocked in October 1983, a few months ahead of my own birth, and the company was fifteen years dead before my first dial tone. The surviving Challengers and Superboards sit with hobbyists now, several of whom document the hardware better than the company ever documented its own software.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the barbershop next to the pizza parlor ~

Five homes in eight years, in order. A garage, then a seven-hundred-square-foot storefront in Hiram that had last been a barbershop and sat next to a pizza parlor, then the Aurora plant, then two more facilities in Cleveland and a circuit board operation in Puerto Rico incorporated as its own company. In November 1980 it also bought the Goleta, California hard drive division of Okidata, which had been making the C-D74 drives its own Challengers used.

The thing it could never fix was software delivery. Stan Veit, who had opened the first computer store in New York City and did business with them, called the company poorly organized and hard to contact, "undercapitalized and very slow to deliver ordered equipment". Dealers complained about how long the business applications took. In late 1978 the company tried to solve it with a cooperative centralized software dealership program, which did not solve it.

~ sold three times in three years ~

The Cheikys decided they could not manage the growth and asked a friend to find them a buyer. The friend produced M/A-COM, a telecommunications conglomerate in Burlington, Massachusetts that had absorbed Linkabit the year before. M/A-COM announced its intent in November 1980 and closed in mid-December for five million dollars in cash, underwritten by McDonald & Co. of Cleveland. The Cheikys took three million of it and Dreisbach took the rest. The purchase surprised the telecommunications industry, and the explanation given was a push to supply offices with complete communications systems. Wikipedia credits that explanation to Irwin M. Jacobs as president of M/A-COM, which is probably a slip: Jacobs ran M/A-COM Linkabit and left in 1985 to found Qualcomm.

The Cheikys were made advisors and then demoted, Charity's account being that M/A-COM disagreed with their guidance. Harvey P. White took over in December 1980 and left for Linkabit seven months later. Research and development moved to Burlington in early 1982 and the Aurora staff became a "support engineering group". In December 1981 the subsidiary was renamed M/A-COM Office Systems, and its president William Chalmers summarized the situation in 1982: "This is not an Ohio or a scientific company any more". A hundred and ten hardware and software products were consolidated down to seven business systems that year.

~ october 3, 1983 ~

M/A-COM announced in August 1982 that it would divest the division by year end, citing a refocus on high-speed digital communications and the cost of writing general-purpose computer software. In February 1983 the buyer was named: Kendata Inc. of Trumbull, Connecticut, a corporate reseller of Victor computers with no manufacturing experience. Its first act was to restore the Ohio Scientific name and use whatever brand recognition was left. Its second was to discover that it could not run a factory against IBM and Tandy.

On 3 October 1983 the Aurora factory was shut down and the inventory liquidated, after Kendata foreclosed on the property. The sixteen remaining employees were let go the same day. Locals read it as the end of the high-tech industry in Aurora. In December 1983 Kendata sold what was left to AB Fannyudde of Sweden, which put it under a subsidiary called Isotron, where the name sat as a second-order subsidiary until Dataindustrier AB bought Isotron in 1986.

Some sources therefore give 1986 as the end, and on paper they are not wrong. The company that made things stopped on 3 October 1983.

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