Supra Corporation

~ the last words ~

John Wiley and Alan Ackerman started Microbits Peripheral Products in Albany, Oregon in 1981, making interface hardware for Atari 8-bit machines. That company went under around 1986 and was reformed under the name Supra, selling hard drives for the Atari ST. For most of the decade that followed it was the sort of firm that the Amiga and ST worlds depended on and nobody outside them had heard of, shipping SCSI controllers and memory boards to people whose computers had been abandoned by their own manufacturers.

The modems were the other half of the business and eventually became all of it. The SupraModem 2400 was cheap enough to be the default recommendation in the Atari and Amiga magazines of the late 1980s, which is a market position built entirely on price and on not being terrible. Supra was good at that position. It had no proprietary silicon of its own and no interest in the corporate accounts that Hayes was selling to.

In 1991 the company arranged something that decided the next five years of its life. Rockwell International had a new chipset implementing V.32bis at 14,400 bits per second, and Supra got an exclusivity arrangement on it. The SupraFAXModem 14400 went on sale in January 1992 at $399, at a moment when most 9,600 bit modems cost more than that. A faster modem at a lower price is not a product launch, it is a demolition. Modem pricing across the whole industry fell hard and kept falling.

That collapse is the part of Supra that reached me, years late and without the name attached. I got online in 1998 on a modem in a house in Turkey, and the reason a 14.4k and then a 33.6k unit was something a family could just buy was that the price of this category had been broken in 1992 by a company in Oregon. Half the cheap modems on the Turkish market in those years had Rockwell silicon inside them too. The fight that set what I paid was six years over by the time I plugged anything in.

~ the record ~

~ the rockwell deal ~

The exclusivity on the Rockwell chipset is worth sitting with, because it is a strategy that only works once and Supra knew it. A small company with no fab gets a window in which it can sell the same silicon everyone will be selling in a year, and the only question is what it does with the window. Supra used it to set a price rather than to take a margin, which bought a reputation and a market share that outlived the exclusive. What it did not buy was any defense for later. The next Rockwell chipset went to everybody, and by 1994 the 14,400 bit modem was a commodity part with nothing left in it for the company that had made it one.

~ what diamond did with it ~

By 1995 Supra was in Vancouver, Washington and Diamond Multimedia was a San Jose company on a buying run, fresh off its own public offering and assembling a catalog of everything that went into a PC expansion slot. On 9 August 1995 Diamond announced it would pay $54 million in cash and shares for Supra. The stated logic was combining modems with Diamond's other boards and pushing into voice-over-data and ISDN, which was the thing everybody in 1995 believed was coming next.

The name did not disappear immediately. Diamond kept selling modems as SupraExpress and SupraMax for years, and plenty of people who owned one in 1998 had no idea Supra had stopped being a company three years earlier. That is the usual shape of a hardware brand after an acquisition. The label stays on the box because the label is what the retail channel recognizes, and the engineering behind it quietly becomes somebody else's.

S3 bought Diamond Multimedia in 1999 and the Supra name faded out of the catalog within a couple of years after that. It had outlasted the Atari ST by a decade and its own corporate existence by four years, and it went out at roughly the same time as the dial-up modem.

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