Qume

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

~ the obituary ~

Qume was founded in 1973 in Hayward, California, by David S. Lee and Robert E. Schroeder, and it was called Ancilex to start with. The name turned out not to be unique enough to keep, so they changed it. Lee came out of Diablo, where the daisy wheel print mechanism had been developed, and set up to build them on his own account.

It worked. Qume grew into the largest printer company in the world, and ITT bought it in 1978 for 164 million dollars, an unheard-of price then for a business five years old. As an ITT division it opened a plant in Puerto Rico around 1980, where one of the people hired turned out to be named Qume, and it widened out into floppy drives in both 8 inch and 5.25 inch sizes. Some of those went into IBM machines, including the Portable Personal Computer and the PCjr.

Then the market left. Printer sales slid through the eighties and the company pushed into terminals and monitors to make up the gap. Its answer on the printing side was the CrystalPrint line, which used a liquid crystal shutter with Casio parts in front of a tungsten halide lamp: the CrystalPrint WP at around 900 pounds in early 1989, emulating a Diablo 630, and the CrystalPrint Publisher at 3,449 pounds later that year, the first with PostScript compatibility through a clone interpreter and Bitstream fonts. In 1990 the same engine turned up inside Computer Concepts' LaserDirect for the Acorn Archimedes at 1,148 pounds.

None of it was enough. The CrystalPrint machines were competent laser-class printers from a company whose reason to exist had been a spinning wheel of metal letters, and the people buying laser printers in 1990 had no reason to care who used to dominate 1978.

~ the case file ~

~ the mechanism ~

A daisy wheel is a flat disc with a raised character on the end of each spoke. The printer spins it to the letter it wants and a hammer hits that spoke against the ribbon. What came out was indistinguishable from a good typewriter, because it was a typewriter mechanism with a computer where the typist used to be, and for roughly a decade nothing else would give you correspondence-grade type off a serial port. The catch sat exactly where the feature did. Changing font meant walking over to the machine and pulling the wheel out by hand.

Offices in Turkey ran impact printers well into the nineties, so the sound is what I can place and the rest I cannot, somewhere between a sewing machine and a stapler going off inside a drawer. The machines themselves belonged to a working life I was too young for. By the time I had anything of my own worth printing, the wheel was gone and the whole category had collapsed into a beige box with toner in it.

~ the name sale ~

After ITT, Qume went free-standing, and control later sat with Wearnes Technology Pte Ltd of Singapore. On 10 November 1993 the trade press reported that Wyse Technology, Taiwanese-owned by then, was buying the assets and liabilities of the Qume terminal, monitor and printer supplies businesses, together with the Qume name, for about 13.8 million dollars. Roughly four million of that was held back by Wyse for a year, pending the sale of inventories and the collection of receivables. Qume said plainly that it had been forced into the deal by pressure from lenders and vendors, which had made it impossible to fund any of its businesses.

Read the deal terms and the ending is not an acquisition at all. It is a company selling the last thing anyone still wanted, which was the four letters above its own door. The proceeds went to bank debt in the United States and Europe and to payables, including those of its 56 percent owned DTC Technology Corp in Taiwan. What remained was a storage controller business doing about 12 million dollars a year, and the company renamed itself Data Technology Corp to go on running it. English Wikipedia files Qume as defunct in 1995 and offers no date at all for the Wyse deal. The trade report is dated 10 November 1993, so this page takes that.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »