WICAT Systems

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

~ the eulogy ~

WICAT stood for the World Institute for Computer Assisted Teaching, and the acronym was older than the company. Dustin H. Heuston, who had been headmaster of the Spence School in Manhattan, organized a nonprofit institute under that name in Utah in 1977 along with C. Victor Bunderson. The New York Times dates that founding to 1976 instead, and nobody gives a month for either year. Heuston picked Utah Valley to sit near Brigham Young University, which was running an instructional computing system called TICCIT. In 1980 the institute spun out a for-profit company, WICAT Systems Inc, in Orem.

The company's own history page is blunt about what it sold, and the unusual part is how much of the stack it built. WICAT designed its own minicomputers. The System 100 shipped in 1980 and was among the first machines anywhere built on the Motorola 68000, which InfoWorld noted in June 1981. The line ran through the 140, the 150 and the 155 up to the System 300, which people called Hydra. It wrote its own operating system, WMCS, and shipped a genuine Unix separately, and Computer Business Review later called it the one-time pioneer of 68000-based Unix systems. On top of all that sat the actual product, which was courseware for schools.

What a district bought was a room. Thirty student terminals wired to one WICAT box, with a teacher console that reported who had done what. The machines spoke aloud for the children who could not read yet. The primary reading curriculum alone ran to 1,010 activities across 285 lessons in thirteen activity types. The catalog went well past reading into writing, spelling, mathematics up to adult level, English as a second language, typing and French, plus an authoring system for districts that wanted to write their own. By the mid-1980s this was a 500-person company spending around $40 million a year, and the institute next door employed another 125 people and spent $2.5 million annually on research.

Heuston's own school was the showroom. The Waterford School, which his wife Nancy founded and then led for over thirty years, put its 325 pupils through the labs for an hour a day on three Hydras of thirty terminals each, at $75,000 to $100,000 to equip each room. He was candid about the economics of the content, telling the Times it cost a million dollars to develop one year of one subject, so twelve years of mathematics came to twelve million. That is the number that explains why there were only ever a handful of companies in this business.

~ the dossier ~

~ the airlines ~

The half of WICAT nobody remembers sold to airlines. By October 1990 the Deseret News reported that about two thirds of the major world airlines used a WICAT system for training, and the company's own site in 1997 still claimed more than half of the largest ones. In December 1989 it won US Air Force Reserve aircrew training for the C-130, a subcontract worth over half a million dollars under CAE-Link covering reservists at eighteen American locations, and in the same month installed three systems worth a million dollars for Scandinavian Airlines maintenance training, one in each of the airline's Scandinavian capitals, through its English subsidiary.

That business is what survived the school business. The aviation arm kept the WICAT name for another thirteen years, long after the company itself had been absorbed, operating out of Lindon, Utah in 1998 and by 2005 as part of a thing called the Faros Group with sites in Tulsa and in Lannion, France.

~ what the merger actually bought ~

Jostens announced the acquisition on 7 April 1992 and closed it that August. The only first-party date comes from Jostens' own annual filing, which says simply that in August 1992 Jostens acquired Wicat Systems Inc, so the day is not on the record anywhere. The structure was a share swap treated as a pooling of interests, roughly 4.1 million Jostens shares for all of WICAT's stock, valued in the press at $100 million to $140 million. WICAT's last standalone numbers, restated into Jostens' accounts, were net sales of $47.8 million and net income of $561,000.

Jostens then killed the thing that made WICAT distinctive. Its fiscal 1993 restructuring includes a line item of $4.1 million to exit the hardware sales and service business, one year after buying a company whose whole proposition was that it built the machines as well as the lessons. WICAT had already conceded the point in public: in October 1990 its own communications manager described the company as de-emphasizing hardware in favor of software that ran on systems schools already owned.

The combined education business went from $201.6 million in fiscal 1993 to $108.6 million in fiscal 1995, with restructuring charges of $60.9 million in a single year, and Jostens sold it to Bain Capital in June 1995 for $50 million in cash plus notes. It had paid about $111 million in stock three years earlier. From Bain the courseware went to Ripplewood in 1999 and was renamed CompassLearning, then to Edgenuity in 2016, and it sits inside Imagine Learning today with nothing of the WICAT name on it.

~ what is left ~

The nonprofit outlasted everything commercial. The WICAT institute became the Wicat Education Institute and then the Waterford Institute, and waterford.org is live today selling early-reading courseware under its own brands. One common error is worth correcting while this page exists: WICAT did not become Wasatch Education Systems. Wasatch was a separate Salt Lake City competitor whose own filings list WICAT's buyer as a rival and never mention WICAT at all.

wicat.com carried a real corporate site until the middle of 2005, served a directory-listing error in 2006, and is now 114 bytes of JavaScript pointing at a GoDaddy sale listing. A Turkish classroom was never in the market for any of this. What paid for these rooms was American school-district budget, and what it bought was a proprietary 68000 machine sold thirty terminals at a time. The computer room I sat in was a set of identical beige PCs running whatever had been copied onto them.

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