Reply Corporation

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

~ the eulogy ~

Steve Petracca spent twelve years at IBM and left because of the charts. He said so out loud, years later: meetings where more time went on arguing about pie charts versus bar charts than about what the data said. He quit in 1988 and moved to San Jose with his severance and some money from friends and family, to start a company that would compete with the product line he had just finished launching.

The overlap was exact. Petracca had managed the start-up of the first IBM PC production line in Boca Raton in 1980, then handled the release strategy and ramp-up of the Personal System/2, IBM's intended successor to the PC. Reply Corporation's first products, announced ahead of COMDEX in November 1989, were PS/2 clones. He hired several of the engineers who had built the real thing.

The technical bet was Micro Channel, the proprietary bus IBM had introduced with the PS/2 and which most of the industry was busy refusing. Reply was the first company to license it for a clone. The machines were deliberately modular, five drive bays and five expansion slots, with the processor sitting on a daughterboard Reply called the TurboProcessor so that the motherboard could outlive the chip. That feature existed because PS/2 buyers were already nervous about obsolescence, and in the end it was the one asset anybody wanted.

IBM's response to all this was to keep doing business with them. In October 1990 Reply joined thirteen other makers of MCA machines, IBM among them, in the Micro Channel Developers Association, against the Compaq-led camp pushing EISA. A 1991 license let Reply ship its machines with genuine IBM hard drives and Model M keyboards. In 1991 Reply became the first outside customer of IBM's Austin circuit board plant. In August 1992 IBM let Reply build machines around IBM's own 386SLC processor, which IBM could not sell as a loose part because of its contract with Intel, so IBM manufactured the chip onto a Reply daughterboard.

~ the dossier ~

~ what the customers told them ~

The price war Compaq started reached Reply in October 1992. Five million dollars of profit went, and so did forty of the hundred staff. What the company did next was unusually sensible: it asked its customers what it should become, and the customers said stop building whole computers.

So Reply stopped. From December 1992 it sold upgrade motherboards instead, aimed at the three or four million PS/2s still sitting in large companies, and those boards would put a 486DX2 into a machine designed in 1987 and add support for ordinary IDE drives that the PS/2 had never been able to take. In April 1993 IBM signed a deal to resell them under IBM branding. There is a particular kind of vindication in a company buying its own obsolescence cure from the man who left over its meeting culture.

~ the upgrade years ~

The last four years were a business of keeping other people's dead hardware alive. Boards for Compaq Deskpros arrived in December 1994 and the ProLinea machines followed in 1995, alongside versions for IBM's own PS/1 and PS/ValuePoint. By that year the headcount was back to a hundred. In December 1995 came the strangest and best product of the lot, the DOS on Mac card, licensed by Apple back in 1994, which dropped a Cyrix or Intel processor onto a PCI card so that a Power Macintosh could run Windows applications without leaving the desk. The 1996 homepage described the company as the System Enhancement Company and quoted the card at two hundred and ninety five dollars.

~ the copyright line nobody removed ~

By 1997 Reply was down to twenty five people and nobody has written down exactly why. In April it sold DOS on Mac to Radius, the Macintosh graphics company in Sunnyvale, which had abandoned its own Mac cloning plans the year before and needed something to sell. The twenty five staff physically moved into Radius's offices. Petracca and ten key engineers were hired by Radius outright.

Computer Business Review covered it on 23 April 1997 and the quotes are unsparing. Radius president Mark Housley confirmed that Reply would keep trading from inside Radius's building with whoever was left, then added that the people they had not picked would still be working for Reply but how long they would be in existence was hard to say. Asked about the remaining company, Housley said that now that Radius owned Reply's main source of business, he did not really think they had much of a business. Radius bought what was left outright later that year, and no source gives a date for it.

The domain tells the rest. reply.com in November 1996 is Reply Corporation of 4435 Fortran Drive, San Jose. The same domain in December 1997 is Radius Inc of Moffett Park Drive, Sunnyvale, selling a renamed version of the same card called Détente, and down in the footer, under the new owner's address, the line still reads Copyright 1996 Reply Corporation. Nobody deleted it.

I spent my own PC years in a country where machines were upgraded rather than replaced, where a case outlived several processors and the component list was something you posted in your forum signature. The product Reply spent its last years selling is the most familiar thing on this page. The company behind it is what never reached me, and reply.com belongs to an Italian consulting group now that has no idea any of this happened.

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