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| Company type |
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|---|---|
| Industry | Technology |
| Founded | 1985; 41 years ago (1985) inLoveland, Colorado, United States |
| Founder | William "Bill" Beierwaltes |
| Defunct | 1992; 34 years ago (1992) |
| Fate | Acquired byHewlett-Packard |
| Products | Quarter-inch cartridge (QIC) drives and tapes |
Number of employees | 600 (1992, peak) |
| Parent |
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Colorado Memory Systems, Inc. (CMS), was an American technology company independently active from 1985 to 1992 and based inLoveland, Colorado. The company primarily manufacturedtape drive systems, especially those usingquarter-inch cartridges (QIC)s, forpersonal computers andworkstations. Colorado Memory Systems was founded by Bill Beierwaltes as an offshoot of his previous company,Colorado Time Systems, also based in Loveland. It was acquired byHewlett-Packard in 1992.
Colorado Memory Systems, Inc., was founded by William "Bill" Beierwaltes inLoveland, Colorado, in 1985, as a division ofColorado Time Systems, another Loveland-based company that he had previously founded in 1972.[1][2] Whereas Colorado Time Systems focused on computerized timekeeping displays forathletics while also selling a broad range of other products, Beierwaltes founded Colorado Memory Systems chiefly to focus ondata storage products for the burgeoningpersonal computer industry of the 1980s.[2] Before founding Colorado Time Systems in 1972, Beierwaltes was a product manager forHewlett-Packard from 1964 to 1974, working on the development and marketing for HP's electronic measuring equipment, especially their line ofvoltmeters.[3][4]
In March 1985, CMS launched its first products, a line of 60-MBquarter-inch cartridge (QIC)drives manufactured byRexon's WangTek division and rebadged asTecmar products for redistribution byIBM.[5][6] The drives made use of the then-ubiquitous QIC-24 tapes and came in three configurations: an external drive sporting only the QIC tape mechanism (QIC/60AT), another external drive comprising the QIC reader–writer and a 20-MBhard disk drive (QIC/60W20), and an internal drive and controller board (QIC/60H). These drives were the first tape backup products to be resold by IBM for theirPersonal Computer platform (by then also including theXT andAT).[5] In August 1985, CMS collaborated again with Tecmar to release a bevy of peripherals forCommodore's newAmiga computer (specifically the premierAmiga 1000). These peripherals included amodem, a multifunction expansion module (includingserial andparallelI/O, areal-time clock, andRAM), and a 20-MB external disk drive. These products were the first peripherals ever to be released for the Amiga.[7]
CMS launched its first independently marketed products with the Jumbo line at the start of 1988.[1] In 1989, they released a system in the Jumbo line, the QIC-150, that was the first to make use ofStac Electronics'Stacker compressionalgorithm in hardware.[8][9] This allowed for a doubling of storage compared to contemporaneous QIC disk drives capacity without incurring a high performance penalty.[8] The release of the QIC-150 shocked CMS' competitors such asArchive Corporation andIrwin Magnetics and upset the QIC Committee, a consortium of 35 companies who developed QIC hardware. The latter called for standardization in the use of such compression algorithms in hardware, as to ensure cross-compatibility between different manufacturers and to prevent unreadable backups when proprietary hardware becomes obsolete.[8][9]
The company's Jumbo line eventually comprised the majority of the company's sales and was instrumental in its success into the early 1990s.[10][11] By May 1990, Colorado Memory Systems had split from its parent company Colorado Time Systems while still operating out of Loveland. Their headquarters spanned 88,000 square feet and employed between 250 and 500 workers, each in disparate divisions, including management, manufacturing, and software development.[10][12]: 38 By late 1992, the company employed 600.[13]
Colorado Memory Systems announced their intention to make aninitial public offering in June 1992.[14] On the day before they were to go public, however,Hewlett-Packard (HP) announced their plans to acquire CMS in whole for an undisclosed amount in September 1992.[15][16] CMS had posted profit of $2.6 million on sales of $131.5 million in the most recentfinancial quarter before their acquisition by HP.[17] CMS remained an independently managed subsidiary of HP for a couple years, from November 1992 to November 1994, before their management was overtaken by HP and the subsidiary relegated to a division of HP.[15][18] HP retained the Colorado Memory Systems name and Loveland headquarters for several years,[19] until those headquarters were bought byAgilent Technologies, a spinoff of HP which acquired the latter's test equipment assets.[18][12] Agilent eventually sold the building to theThompson School District.[12]
Two disgruntled executives of CMS, unhappy with the acquisition by HP, founded ComByte, Inc., in 1993.[16] Beierwaltes himself exited retirement after CMS' acquisition to found OneStep Software in 1997. In 1998, he became theCEO ofOnStream, a spin-off ofPhilips dedicated to tape drives and other data storage devices.[2][3]
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