TeleVideo

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

~ the obituary ~

TeleVideo's final public statement has been sitting at televideo.com since the autumn of 2011, and it runs to one sentence. After more than 35 years in business and with millions of terminals sold worldwide, TeleVideo discontinued the manufacturing and sales of all terminal products as of September 30, 2011. The Internet Archive brackets the changeover between the fifth of October and the fifth of November that year, when the site stopped being four kilobytes of product pages and became two kilobytes of that one sentence.

TeleVideo was founded in 1975 by Dr. K. Philip Hwang, and the company's own 2003 filing describes the business in its own words: it pioneered "smart" terminals built on the Intel microprocessor at a time when dumb terminals were the industry standard. The green screens carried model numbers that people who worked on them can still recite, the 912 and the 925 among them, and the same filing claims a total installed base of over 3 million text terminals. Hwang took the company public in March 1983, in the window when a terminal maker could still look like a growth stock, and the retellings of that year put the paper value of his own stake near half a billion dollars.

Then it stopped making money and never started again. The filing says so without decoration: since 1992 TeleVideo had reported significant operating losses every year and had suffered a continuing erosion of sales, which by the date of that document was eleven years in a row. Net sales were $14.8 million in the fiscal year ending October 1998 and $8.2 million four years later, with an operating loss in each of those years, the gap covered by a line of credit and loans from a Hwang family entity.

~ the case file ~

~ the smart terminal ~

The idea that made the company was putting a processor inside the glass. A dumb terminal drew what the minicomputer told it to draw and nothing else; a TeleVideo could handle its own screen, which took work off the shared machine upstairs and made a roomful of them cheaper to run. That advantage lasted exactly as long as the shared machine stayed expensive. The IBM PC shipped in 1981, the clones followed it, and within a few years the computer had moved onto the desk instead of living down the hall.

TeleVideo understood this early and guessed wrong about what to do next. It shipped the TS-1603 in April 1983 with an 8088 and MS-DOS 2.0, offering CP/M-86 as an option for anyone not yet convinced. Three years later it arrived at a plain AT clone, the TELECAT-286, which is where the argument ended. By 2002 the product plan was Windows-Based Terminals and Internet appliances, which were terminals again under names the 2000s preferred.

These were American office machines from years before I owned a modem, so the hardware itself never reached me. The model numbers did, by a stranger route. The computer this site is built on runs Debian, and its terminfo database carries 105 entries whose names begin with tvi, covering thirteen TeleVideo models from the tvi92 to the tvi970. Ask it for infocmp tvi925 in 2026 and it prints the capabilities of a TeleVideo 925 without complaint.

~ sixty seven thousandths of a dollar ~

On 26 November 2002 the board approved a plan to take the company private. Homebound Acquisition, Inc. had been set up by Hwang, who already beneficially owned about 63 percent of the voting stock, and it offered $0.0675 in cash for each share he did not control. The arithmetic sits in the filing fee table: 4,182,200 shares at six and three quarter cents, an aggregate transaction value of $282,298.50, and a fee owed to the SEC of $25.97.

Because Hwang held a majority, he signed a written consent approving the merger himself, and the document that went out to everyone else on 14 February 2003 says plainly that their vote was not required and not wanted. The bank hired to bless the price, Sutter Securities, put its reasoning in one sentence: TeleVideo's common stock had little intrinsic value. It noted negative stockholders' equity as of 31 July 2002 and $2,517,000 drawn on the credit line. The board terminated the agreement later that year anyway, and the stock went on trading on the OTC Bulletin Board for three more.

~ the last paragraph ~

The thin client business went to Neoware in October 2005. Chapter 11 followed in March 2006, and the First Amended Plan of Reorganization was consummated on 28 July 2006, canceling every share of old common stock and issuing new shares to one person, Mrs. C. Gemma Hwang, as sole shareholder. Her husband stayed on as chief executive. The Form 15 deregistering the company arrived at the SEC on 1 August 2006, and after twenty three years the public history of TeleVideo stops there.

What came after is only visible through the website, which went on advertising terminals to nobody in particular for five more years. Somewhere in October 2011 the pages came down and the sentence went up, and it is still up, copyright notice frozen at 2012, counting 35 years and millions of units for an audience of search engines.

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