Tulip Computers

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

~ the obit ~

Compudata started in 's-Hertogenbosch in 1979, founded by Franz Hetzenauer and Rob Romein to import American microcomputers into the Netherlands. Its first real product was somebody else's: the Exidy Sorcerer, a Z80 home computer whose maker lost interest almost immediately. Compudata licensed the design and kept building Sorcerers locally for years after Exidy had moved on.

The Tulip of its own came in 1983. The System-1 was a 16-bit machine at a moment when most of the market was still 8-bit, and it ran a generic MS-DOS without being BIOS-compatible with IBM's 5150. Later models went for full compatibility the direct way, by copying IBM's BIOS, and IBM sued. The case ground on for years and was settled out of court in 1989 for a sum neither side published.

In between, the company had its good decade. It got an Amsterdam Stock Exchange listing in 1984 and renamed itself Tulip Computers in 1987. For a stretch in between it was the biggest computer seller in the Dutch market behind IBM, and the fourth biggest in Europe. It put its name on a cycling team and on Crystal Palace shirts. For a while the Netherlands had a national PC brand in the way that Britain had Amstrad.

Then came the margin. PC clones stopped being a business where engineering mattered and became one where purchasing did, and Tulip was too small to win on purchasing. The 1997 figures showed a record loss of 27.5 million guilders, and they were published shortly after Hetzenauer had sold shares. The factory went to Ingram Micro and 250 people lost their jobs. What was left of Tulip carried on as a sales organization under the Royal Begemann Group.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the commodore decade ~

In September 1997 Tulip bought the Commodore trademarks out of the wreck of Escom, which had bought them out of the wreck of Commodore itself. Tulip then spent eight years doing what every holder of that name has done since: licensing it onto products with no connection to the machines people remembered, and announcing an entertainment strategy every couple of years.

The name was sold on to Yeahronimo Media Ventures for a reported 22 million euros, negotiated from the end of 2004 and completed in March 2005. In September 2007 Tulip announced it wanted the brand back at a dollar a share, on the theory that Commodore's new activities had made it worth more. Nothing came of it.

~ the suing years ~

Late Tulip spent a striking amount of its energy in court. In 2000 the government of Bangladesh canceled a Dutch-funded contract to supply it computers, saying the price was too high; Tulip sued in The Hague and won compensation. The same year it went after Dell over US patent 5,594,621, its riser card design for folding the PCI and ISA buses into one compact board. Both suits ran while the manufacturing business underneath them was being dismantled.

~ what it was from here ~

Tulip never sold a machine in Turkey. The brand would have stayed a blank to me if it had not bought the Commodore name while I was in middle school. That is the odd shape of this one: the only part of the company that ever reached me was a logo it was renting out, attached to things built by other people in other countries. Dutch readers get a national computer brand here. I get a trademark holder.

~ the last name change ~

By May 2006 the Benelux operation had been renamed Terra Computers Benelux. On 26 June 2008 the listed company dropped the Tulip name entirely and became Nedfield NV, after the investment vehicle that controlled it, and by then it was selling communications and home entertainment gear rather than computers. The Tulip name came off the listed company fifteen months before the company itself ended.

The German subsidiary failed in February 2009 and another subsidiary followed on 15 June. Nedfield asked the Utrecht court for suspension of payments two weeks after that. On 3 September 2009 the court turned the suspension into bankruptcy, case 09/578F, and a curator spent the next four years filing public reports on what was left. The tulip.com domain belongs to an unrelated American company now, and tulipcomputers.com is a parking lander with a single redirect in it.

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