The Panda Project

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

~ the last words ~

Stanford W. Crane Jr. started The Panda Project in April 1992 and picked a name that said nothing about computers, on the theory that competitors would not think to watch a company called Panda. The office was 1,900 square feet in Boca Raton and it had belonged to Don Estridge, who ran the team that built the IBM PC. Crane then hired out of IBM as fast as he could. By March 1995 he had Joseph Sarubbi, who architected the PC XT, plus a dozen more names off the same alumni list.

There were two things to sell. VSPA, announced in September 1994 and developed with IBM Microelectronics, was a chip packaging method that shrank an integrated circuit by sixty to seventy percent against the plastic quad flat packs everyone else was shipping. The Archistrat was a modular workstation built around a custom 256-bit backplane and a patented connector Crane called Compass, which packed as many as 1,100 contacts into a square inch. The May 1994 IPO raised ten million dollars and headcount peaked near 140 the year after.

The Archistrat shipped in October 1995 and Byte ran it on that month's cover under the headline "The PC is dead." The PC was not dead. Panda was selling a modular workstation at workstation money into a market that had just worked out it could order a Pentium box from a catalog for a fraction of it, and the machine moved in quantities small enough that no source bothers to print the figure. In April 1998 Crane announced one more desktop, Rock City, running a Pentium MMX at 200 to 233 MHz. It was an ordinary PC from the company that had declared the PC dead.

That Byte cover came out in October 1995. I was eleven and in Ankara, still three years off my first modem. The American workstation press was not something that reached a Turkish household at any price. Panda's entire public life ran from the IPO to the asset sale without ever crossing anything I could have touched.

~ the record ~

~ the connector ~

Compass was the part of Panda that other people wanted. The pitch was density: a socket that could carry more signal lines through less board area than the pin arrays of the day, which is exactly the constraint that decides how wide a bus you can build. The 256-bit backplane in the Archistrat existed to show it off. AMP Incorporated, where Crane had worked in the seventies, took the first VSPA license in 1996.

Licensing the packaging turned out to be the only business Panda had that anybody would pay for, and it was not enough to carry a workstation line and 140 salaries at the same time.

~ how it came apart ~

In November 1998 Panda sold the computer systems division to Round Stone Holdings, a British buyer that took the development rights along with the tooling for every machine Panda made. That was the hardware company gone. The following year the VSPA patents and whatever else was left went to Silicon Bandwidth, a startup in San Bruno, California, and Panda finished the transaction as a non-practicing public shell.

Crane resigned as chairman and chief executive in April 2000. He and his wife left the same month, and the last assets went with them.

~ the shell ~

The listing outlived the products by four years. In June 2004 the empty company bought three divisions of Coda Octopus, a vendor of seafloor mapping and visualization software, and came back to the market as Coda Octopus Group, which was still trading in 2024. Nothing of Panda survived that except the registration itself. A company can end and its paperwork can keep going to work every morning under a different name.

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