Stac Electronics

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

~ the eulogy ~

The company was incorporated the year before I was born, and the product everyone remembers had already lost its market by the time I had a machine to run it on. The half of Stac that did reach me arrived without a name attached. LZS, the compression method this company patented, went into an IETF standard in 1996 and from there into router firmware, and by the time I was setting up a serial link in a university lab the word "stac" was a keyword in a configuration file. Nobody in that room could have told you it was a company in California.

Stac started in Pasadena in 1983 as State of the Art Consulting, put together by five Caltech computer science graduate students with two engineers from industry alongside them. One of the five was Bill Dally, who went on to MIT and Stanford and is chief scientist at Nvidia now. They took consulting work to pay for themselves and in February 1987 they began designing VLSI compression chips for tape drives, which is what they actually wanted to do. The consulting wound down as the silicon came up.

Stacker was downstream of the chip work. The Lempel-Ziv-Stac algorithm was built to run in hardware, and the first Stacker product in 1990 shipped as a card with a coprocessor on it before the pure software version took over. The software was easier to sell and it sold in the millions. For three years Stac was a top-ten DOS software publisher, it went public in 1992, and it spent 1993 and 1994 in court with Microsoft over MS-DOS 6.0 and its DoubleSpace feature. The jury verdict and the settlement that followed are told in full on the Stacker stone and do not need retelling here.

What that stone cannot say, because it is about a product, is where the settlement money went. Stac had never really been a consumer software house, and once the payout landed it went back to the kind of customer it understood. It bought ReachOut for remote control and Replica for server imaging and went after corporate IT, renamed itself Stac Software in 1998, then Previo in April 2000, and spent its last two years selling a desktop recovery tool to help desks. Previo sold its core technology to Altiris on 15 July 2002 and dissolved.

~ the dossier ~

~ before the software ~

The founding business was data compression for tape. A nine-track or QIC cartridge drive in the late 1980s had a fixed throughput and a fixed capacity, and a chip that compressed the stream on its way to the head made the drive look better on both numbers without changing the mechanism. That is a components business with a small number of large customers, and it is the business the founders designed for. Selling a box of floppies to a home PC user was not on the plan.

It ended up being the thing that paid, because the same arithmetic worked on a hard disk. A 40 megabyte drive in 1991 cost real money and filled up in a season, and a program that made it behave like 80 was worth a hundred dollars to almost anybody. That is the whole of Stacker's commercial logic, and it is also why the product had an expiry date built into it from the start. Drives got cheaper every year.

~ the algorithm that outlived the company ~

LZS is the part of Stac still running. It was written up as RFC 1974 in August 1996 as the PPP Stac LZS Compression Protocol and came back in RFC 2395 for IP payload compression. It was still being specified as late as RFC 3943, which makes it a compression method for TLS. Network gear picked it up because it was cheap in gates and predictable in latency, which is exactly what it had been designed for back when the target was a tape drive.

The company organized the silicon into a subsidiary called Hifn in 1996 and floated it separately, with the spin-off completing on 25 March 1999. Hifn sold compression and encryption accelerators into VPN appliances and storage controllers for the next decade, which was a quieter and better business than anything the parent had left. Exar bought it on 3 April 2009. The chip half of Stac Electronics therefore survived the software half by nine years and died as a line item in someone else's acquisition.

The company wore three names in seventeen years and every rename marked a retreat from a market it had failed to hold. Stac Electronics designed chips; by the time it was Previo it was selling a desktop recovery tool to help desks, which is about as far from a VLSI compression pipeline as a business can travel without changing address. The patents went to Hifn and the software went to Altiris, Altiris went to Symantec in 2007, and the trail ends inside a product catalog that no longer lists any of it.

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