Radius Inc.

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

~ the eulogy ~

Radius was incorporated on 16 May 1986 by Burrell Smith, Mike Boich, Matt Carter and Alain Rossmann, with Andy Hertzfeld joining them. Smith had designed the digital board of the original Macintosh and Hertzfeld had written much of its system software, so the company's entire premise was that the people who knew where the machine had been compromised would sell you the fix.

The first fix was the screen. The Radius Full Page Display gave a Mac a vertical monitor tall enough to show an entire printed page at once, one of the first large screens available for any personal computer, and it arrived exactly when desktop publishing was turning the Macintosh into a professional tool. The second was speed: accelerator boards that dropped a faster Motorola processor into a machine Apple had shipped underpowered.

Then came the Pivot, a monitor on a mount that you physically rotated between portrait and landscape while the system software followed it around, which was a party trick and a genuinely good idea at the same time. VideoVision did capture. The Radius Rocket put multiple 68040 processors inside one Mac. The company went public in June 1990 and by 1992 was already in trouble, with shareholder suits and its first unprofitable quarter, which is what happens when your market is a single vendor's installed base and that vendor starts shipping the features you sell.

August 1994 brought a merger with SuperMac in an $80.5 million stock swap, joining the two biggest Mac graphics companies into one that was still losing money. In March 1995 Radius became the first licensed Macintosh clone vendor and built a high-end system of its own. Apple ended the clone program two years later, Radius sold its monitor business to miro Displays in August 1998, and on 6 January 1999 the company renamed itself Digital Origin and became a digital video software firm. It agreed to be bought by Media 100 on 28 December 1999 and the merger completed on 9 May 2000.

~ the dossier ~

~ the pivot ~

It is worth dwelling on the rotating monitor because it is the clearest thing this company ever made. A page is taller than it is wide. A monitor in 1990 was wider than it was tall. Everyone had accepted that mismatch as a fact of nature, and Radius simply put the display on a hinge and made the driver notice which way it was facing.

Nobody sells that today, which usually means an idea was wrong. This one was not wrong, it was priced for a profession. If you laid out pages for a living, seeing the whole page at full height was worth a lot of money, and if you did not, it was worth nothing at all. That sentence describes almost the entire Radius catalog.

~ the clone year ~

Being the first company licensed to build a Macintosh in March 1995 looked like an arrival. In practice it was a lease on a business Apple could repossess, and Apple repossessed it. The clone makers who went hard at the low end took volume from Apple directly; Radius went at the high end, which was a smaller market and the one Apple cared most about defending.

The deeper problem was older than the clones. Every product Radius made was an answer to something Apple had left out, and Apple kept filling those gaps itself. Better built-in video, better displays, faster machines. A company whose entire product line is other people's omissions is only as durable as their willingness to keep omitting.

~ what it became ~

The rename on 6 January 1999 was not a rebrand, it was an exit. The hardware was gone, the monitor line had been sold off the previous August, and what was left was a video software group that shipped EditDV. Digital Origin lasted about sixteen months as its own company before Media 100 absorbed it.

None of this reached me directly. In Turkey the Macintosh was not a personal machine in the nineties, it was a machine in a matbaa, in the prepress rooms and the ad agencies where somebody had bought one because the film came out right, and the second monitor beside it was part of the job rather than part of anyone's home. That is the whole audience Radius ever had, everywhere, including in America. It built for a profession and then the profession's supplier decided to sell the same parts itself.

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