Orange Micro

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

~ the obit ~

Orange Micro sold expansion cards out of Anaheim, California for about two decades. The Computer Industry Almanac dates the company to 1984, although the Grappler+ was already being advertised in BYTE in January 1983, so it was shipping product before the year the reference books give for its founding.

The Grappler+ is the product people remember. It was a parallel printer interface for the Apple II, and what made it worth money was that it could send the contents of the screen to a dot matrix printer as a picture rather than as text. Printing graphics in 1983 was not a thing a computer did by default. You bought a card for it.

Then in the early nineties the company found a much stranger business. It bought the rights to AST Research's Mac286 and started building DOS compatibility cards: a real x86 processor with its own memory and video chipset, on a board that slotted into a Macintosh so that Windows software ran on PC hardware a few inches from the Mac's own.

Two operating systems on one machine, in my world, meant a disk partition and a boot menu, and later a window with a virtual machine inside it. Buying a second computer on a card never came up. Orange Micro's customers had a problem nobody around me had, which was owning the beautiful machine and still needing the ugly software.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the grappler years ~

The Apple II line was where the company learned its trade. Besides the Grappler+ there was a parallel port adapter for the Apple IIc, which had no slots to put a card in, and memory expansion boards for the Apple IIGS. These were the sort of products that existed because Apple shipped a machine with holes in it and left other people to fill them.

Orange Micro collected a reputation in the Apple press for cards that worked, which mattered in a market where a lot of third-party hardware did not.

~ two computers in one box ~

The OrangePC line ran for most of the nineties and the specifications track the PC industry exactly. The Model 220 for NuBus Macs carried a 66 MHz 486DX2 and 8 MB of memory, and Macworld put its December 1995 retail price at 1,127 dollars. That is the price of a decent PC, bought as an accessory for a Mac you already owned.

Prices fell hard. The OrangePC 620 started at 399 dollars in 1998 with a 200 or 233 MHz processor, and some models reached that price with AMD or Cyrix parts instead of Intel ones. The 660 that followed took a Socket 7 processor up to a 400 MHz K6-III and an NVIDIA RIVA 128 for video. The PCfx! was a cut-down 660 with the Pentium soldered on, and Macworld reviewed it in the games column, because by then the honest reason a Mac owner wanted a PC inside the case was that the games were over there.

The competition was SoftPC and its descendants, which did the same job in software and were much slower, since the card was running real silicon. For a decade the card won that argument on speed alone.

~ the firewire years ~

When the compatibility business thinned out, the company moved to FireWire. OrangeLink controllers and a webcam called the iBot took over the catalog, reviewed in MacAddict in July 2000 and advertised in Macworld a year later. It was a reasonable business and a much smaller one than selling 1,100 dollar cards had been.

~ the placeholder page ~

There was no announcement. On 18 May 2005 Ars Technica posted a short item asking whether anyone could confirm that Orange Micro had gone under, noting that the website redirected to a placeholder and the phone number was disconnected. The capture record agrees. A crawl on 8 May 2005 still found the company's own pages at orangemicro.com, and the captures from the first week of June are all redirects. Everything USB put up a notice titled "Orange Micro has gone Out of Business" dated 8 July 2005.

Wikipedia files the company under 2004, which is where most retellings get their date, and the only citation on that sentence is the 2005 notice. The last thing the site did under its own name happened in May 2005, which is the date this headstone takes.

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