 | |
| Formerly |
|
|---|---|
| Company type | Public |
| Industry | Computer software |
| Founded | 1983; 43 years ago (1983) asState of the Art Consulting inPasadena, California, United States |
| Founder | Gary Clow, Doug Whiting, John Tanner, Mike Schuster,William Dally, Scott Karns, Robert Monsour, Robert Johnson, Hugh Ness |
| Fate | Dissolved in 2002; 24 years ago (2002) |
| Headquarters | , United States |
| Products | Stackerdisk compression utility |
Stac Electronics, originally incorporated asState of the Art Consulting and later shortened toStac, Inc., was a technology company founded in 1983. It is known primarily for itsLempel–Ziv–Staclossless compression algorithm andStackerdisk compression utility for compressing data for storage.
The original founders included fiveCaltech graduate students in Computer Science (Gary Clow, Doug Whiting, John Tanner, Mike Schuster andWilliam Dally),[1] two engineers from the industry (Scott Karns and Robert Monsour) and two board members from the industry (Robert Johnson of Southern California Ventures and Hugh Ness ofScientific Atlanta). The first employee was Bruce Behymer, a Caltech undergraduate in Engineering and Applied Science.
Originally headquartered inPasadena,California and later inCarlsbad,California, the company received venture capital funding to pursue a business plan as afabless chip company selling application-specific standard products to the tape drive industry. The plan was to include expansion into the disk drive market, which was much larger than thetape drive market. Following the success ofCirrus in the disk drive market, this was the real basis for venture capitalists' interest in Stac.
As part of the application engineering to adapt itsdata compression chips for use in disk drives, the company implemented aDOSdriver that transparently compressed data written to a PC hard disk and decompressed the data transparently upon subsequent hard disk reads. In doing so, they discovered that given the relative speed difference between the PC processor and the disk drive access times, it was possible to perform the data compression in software, obviating the need for a data compression chip in every disk drive, as they were planning to produce. This DOS driver was written inx86assembly language under contract by Paul Houle.
In 1990, the company released Stacker, adisk compression utility. The product was highly successful, due to the relatively small capacities (20 to 80 megabytes) and high prices of contemporary hard drives, at a time when larger software packages such as Microsoft's new Windows user interface were becoming popular. On average, Stacker doubled disk capacity, and usually increased disk performance by compressing the data before writing and after reading, compensating for the relative slowness of the drives. Stac sold several million units of Stacker over the product's lifetime.
They also released a hardware product calledSTAC Coprocessor Card, which claimed to not only improve the compression of the files, but to decrease the time needed to compress files. Salient Software would license Stac's acceleration technology for use in theirNuBusDoubleUp andPDSBullet cards for theMacintosh, though they would use Salient's ownDiskDoubler software.[2]
At some time prior to 1996, the company relocated its main office from Carlsbad toCarmel Valley, inSan Diego, and maintained a programming group inEstonia. After settling the lawsuit with Microsoft, Stac attempted to expand its productportfolio in the utility software segment by adding additional storage and communication titles through internal development and acquisition. The company scrambled to replace the revenues lost after the market for hard drive compression software collapsed with the inclusion ofDoubleSpace in MS-DOS and the rapid decline in hard disk cost per megabyte. Using the funds from itsIPO (1992) and the settlement with Microsoft, Stac acquired aremote desktop software product called "ReachOut". It acquired a server image backup product, "Replica", and internally developed a network backup product forworkstations andlaptops, and marketed this product first as "Replica NDM" and later as "eSupport Essentials". Much of the technology pioneered in Stac's network backup offering ultimately found its way into today's online backup solutions.[citation needed]
Meanwhile, Stac's original chip business continued to grow. In order to realize shareholder value, its chip subsidiary calledHifn, was spun off in 1998 in a primary public offering.[3]
Stac then renamed the remaining utility software company to "Previo", and repositioned itself as ahelp desk and support organization tool provider. This effort was pursued while thedot-com bubble was bursting, and in 2002 management elected to take the unusual step of selling Stac's remaining technology assets (toAltiris) and returning its remaining cash toshareholders before dissolving.
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In 1993,Microsoft releasedMS-DOS 6.0, which included a disk compression program calledDoubleSpace. Microsoft had previously been in discussions with Stac to license its compression technology, and had discussions with Stac engineers and examined Stac's code as part of thedue diligence process. Stac, in an effort led by attorneyMorgan Chu, sued Microsoft forinfringement of two of its data compression patents.[4] Meanwhile, Microsoft had filed an injunction against Stac to prevent the company from selling its Stacker 3.1 software for Windows and DOS, attracting claims from Stac representatives that with a licensing deal having been made with rival DOS vendor,Novell, and with Microsoft no longer facing action from theFederal Communications Commission, the company had become emboldened to "dominate the data compression market".[5] In 1994, a California jury ruled the infringement by Microsoft was not willful, but awarded Stac $120 million in compensatory damages, coming to about $5.50 per copy of MS-DOS 6.0 that had been sold. The jury also agreed with a Microsoftcounterclaim that Stac had misappropriated the Microsofttrade secret of a pre-loading feature that was included in Stacker 3.1, and simultaneously awarded Microsoft $13.6 million on the counterclaim.[6]
While Microsoft prepared an appeal, Stac obtained a preliminaryinjunction from the court stopping the sales of all MS-DOS products that included DoubleSpace; by this time Microsoft had already started shipping an "upgrade" of MS-DOS to itsOEM customers that removed DoubleSpace. By the end of 1994, Microsoft and Stac settled all pending litigation by agreeing that Microsoft would make a $39.9 million investment in Stac Electronics, and additionally pay Stac about $43 million in royalties on their patents.
