Otrona Advanced Systems

~ the obit ~

Boulder, Colorado had exactly one personal computer company in its history and it lasted under three years. Otrona opened early in 1982, put the Attache on sale that april, and was finished by september 1984. In that window it built what several people who owned one still describe as the best small computer of the era, and it is a name almost nobody outside Colorado has heard since.

The Attache came out of Ron Lingeman, an engineer who had done his real training at Hewlett-Packard and had once built an eighty pound airborne computer for a man who flew rockets into tornadoes. That job is what got him thinking about how small a computer could get. He designed most of the Attache himself, in evenings, aimed at technical customers, using the best parts he could find for every function. Otrona showed it at Comdex, picked up a venture fund out of Cambridge on the strength of the reaction, and was in business.

The machine folded into something the size of a fat briefcase, weighed twenty pounds against the thirty of Compaq's supposedly portable model, and stood itself up on its own carrying handle when you opened it. Inside was a 4 MHz Z80A under CP/M with two half-height floppy drives. The monochrome tube was tack sharp by the standards of 1982 and the keyboard was still being praised by the people who owned one thirty years later. It also shipped with Valet, a set of small programs including a calculator and a calendar that could be pulled up over whatever you were already running, two years before the Macintosh made desk accessories a familiar idea.

It cost 3,995 dollars, which was roughly twice an Apple II.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it fell apart ~

The problem was never the engineering and Lingeman has said so plainly: running the business was the part they could not do, and they never found a way to build the thing cheaply enough to make a profit on it. Underneath that was the chip. The Attache was a Z80 machine in the months when the IBM PC was making the 8088 into a standard, and standards are not a technical argument. They are about which machine the software you want will run on.

Otrona tried to cross over twice. The 8:16 in 1983 added an 8086 board so it could at least run Lotus 1-2-3, and the 2001 in may 1984 was a ground-up IBM compatible with a hinged screen at twice the resolution of a normal PC and a hard disk option. It was the better machine again and it cost more to produce than planned. By then the company was caught in a loop where it could not buy parts without revenue and could not book revenue without parts. It needed another venture round, the investors said no, and in september 1984 it closed with 160 people on the payroll.

~ the shape of the failure ~

Nothing about this story reached where I was. CP/M portables were a US business market that had come and gone before a home computer in Turkey was a normal thing to own, and by the time I had a machine of my own the argument had been settled so completely that there was nothing to argue about: it was a PC clone, it ran DOS and then Windows, and the question of which processor was underneath had stopped being a question.

What carries is the shape of the failure, which is the one every engineer eventually meets. Otrona was better on every axis its own people cared about, and it lost on the only axis the market was measuring, which was what everyone else had already bought. Fewer than ten thousand Attaches were ever sold. Six hundred of them went to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is the customer you get when you build the most capable version of the thing and the wrong one for everybody else.

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