Datapoint Corporation, originally known as Computer Terminal Corporation (CTC), was a computer company based in San Antonio, Texas, United States. Founded in July 1968 by Phil Ray and Gus Roche, its first products were, as the company's original name suggests, computer terminals intended to replace Teletype machines connected to time sharing systems.
Background From the mid-1960s, engineers (John) Phil Ray and Austin O. "Gus" Roche were working for General Dynamics Dynatronic Division in Florida, as part of a computing contract team for NASA working on the Apollo programme. At the time, mainframe computers were large room-filling pieces of equipment, from which data was output using noisy and slow Teletype terminals. On the advice of one of his tutors from the University of Texas, Ray and Roche decided to develop a quieter and smaller input device based on using a television set screen.
Early history
After finding San Antonio, Texas based backers, the pair incorporated Computer Terminal Corporation (CTC) there in July 1968. Based on a newly developed Texas Instruments chip, with a casing designed by an industrial designer in New York City, the company had developed three prototype Datapoint 3300 (deriving the name from the popular Teletype Model 33 teleprinter), it was an immediate hit at that year's computer show.
However, the resultant orders left the company with several major problems: they had no production capacity, and no money with which to build a factory. In October 1969, the company raised US$4 million through an initial public offering (IPO). This enabled them to outsource production short term to a series of local manufacturers, including a motorcycle helmet manufacturer, before constructing their own manufacturing premises. Once in production, they began sourcing chips from both TI and Intel, running up large debts from both.
The Datapoint 3300 sold very successfully for a number of years. It was later rebadged as the DEC VT06 and the HP 2600A.
Datapoint 2200 and the Intel 8008 Having raised $4 million in an IPO in August 1969, selling over the counter for $8, by August 1970 the shares were selling at $45.
Ray and Roche wanted to develop a new, more intelligent terminal, and employed a trio of engineers who knew each other from their interests in amateur radio: Victor Poor, Harry Pyle and undergraduate Jonathan Schmidt. The company began development on the Datapoint 2200, its most popular product and credited by some historians as the invention of the personal computer.
While working his notice from Maryland-based Frederick Electronics during the 1969 Thanksgiving holiday, Poor and Pyle developed the underlying instruction set architecture of the processor on a living room floor. This enabled Phil Ray and Gus Roche to design and develop the mass-produced programmable 2200, which could load various emulations stored on cassette tapes. Some users of the terminals chose to use them as simple programmable computers instead.
The original 2200 processor board was a serial design using standard TTL and Intel shift registers for memory.
In December 1969 Poor joined CTC as Technical Director, employing Pyle within his team and sponsoring Schmidt through his degree.
CTC did not believe it could meet its design goals for the CPU built from discrete TTL chips. Ray and Roche asked how much of their design could fit onto a microprocessor chip. Poor and Pyle developed a project that would cost $100,000 to place their architecture onto silicon and into production.
Ray and Roche arranged dinner with Robert Noyce, the President of Intel, along with the President of Texas Instruments. Having pre-drawn the schematic for the microprocessor on two postcards, Ray gave one to each of his guests, and then made a bet: that the first company to build a computer on a chip (microprocessor) would forgive Datapoint its outstanding invoice. In part this was fiscally driven, as both supplier debts were large, and the annulment of either would mean that CTC could avoid a follow-on offering. Noyce initially questioned the approach, suggesting that development of the microprocessor would reduce Intel's sales of their dumb shift registers, but eventually agreed to the deal.
The result was the development of the Intel 8008 microprocessor by Ted Hoff and Stan Mazor of Intel. This design was rejected by Datapoint management, when the demonstration version was not performant and Intel could not meet Datapoint's product launch date. Consequently, the 2200 was released using the conventional SSI/MSI chip technology of the time. "The 8-bit 8008 microprocessor had been developed in tandem with the 4004 and was introduced in April 1972. It was originally intended to be a custom chip for Computer Terminals Corp. of Texas, later to be known as Datapoint." "As it developed, CTC rejected the 8008 because it was too slow for the company's purpose and required too many supporting chips." Datapoint continued to produce processors that went into the Datapoint 6600 around 1982 and later series.
Thus, today's overwhelmingly dominant instruction set architecture, used in Intel's x86 family of processors as well as all compatible CPUs from AMD and others, traces its ancestry directly back to CTC. The 2200 had an optional disk drive using Shugart 8" floppies, single-sided, single-density, and was the first commercial computer to include them.
The Datapoint 2200 became so popular that CTC later changed its name to Datapoint Corp.
At this time the 2200 processor also had access to an ARCNET card, contributed to by Victor Poor, now working for Datapoint. This was the first commercial local area network (LAN) card, with over ten thousand ARCNET LAN installations in use around the world. The ARCNET card in each 2200 allowed 2200's running a program to access LAN-connected 2200s with attached storage (disk) or printers. This was the first true Distributed Processing over a LAN, as used in Australian Cotton (AusCot Syd), Commodities Trading Sydney, KPMG Sydney and many other small to medium-sized businesses. The LAN was later duplicated by IBM, Banyan, Novell and others using variants of media or methodology. In response, Datapoint offered the Token Ring LAN capability to Tandy for its TRS-80, but ARCNET never really gained any foothold again.
They then asked Schmidt to write the accompanying communications software.
In later years, after the death of John Phil Ray, his widow and fellow dinner guest Brenda Ray Coffee was deposed by Baker Botts, the attorneys for Texas Instruments, when TI and Intel were involved in their lawsuit as to which one "invented" the microprocessor.
Boom period: 1973-1980 Despite the success of the 2200, the company lacked the finances and skills to manage its own production, and was hence quickly running out of cash. After Ray and Roche investigated and then dismissed selling the company, they agreed to a deal to gain an investment from TRW. However, after realising that his company would be competing with major customer IBM, the President of TRW pulled out of the deal, and renegotiated it as the purchase of overseas manufacturing rights. Combined with other institutional share sales, this raised the required $7M to finance the development of a new product.
However, on investigative audit the new investors found that Datapoint's corporate accounts hid various holes and challenges. After forcing the resignation of the company's first chairman, San Antonio insurance salesman Gerald Mazur, they appointed Harold O'Kelley, who had an engineering background and had been a vice-president of the electronics firm Harris Corporation, and formally renamed the firm Datapoint.
O'Kelley immediately realised that the TRW deal was fatally flawed. Effectively, it allowed TRW to manufacture outside North America, but then import the product and sell directly against Datapoint in North America. After renegotiations, O'Kelley and TRW agreed a new contract which allowed TRW to market the product outside North America, but not to manufacture it. He then raised an additional $8 million via a third Wall Street-backed public offering, with a plan to raise sales from $18M to $100M within five years. As a result, under the chairmanship of O'Kelley, between 1973 and 1981, revenues grew at a 40% pace, with sales surpassing $100M in 1977, reaching $450M by 1981.
This growth was only enabled through the development of various products through the partnership between Ray, Roche, Poor and Pyle. These included Datashare, a concept that allowed many terminals to communicate with each other independent of a mainframe. In 1976, Datapoint introduced a machine that automatically routed outgoing telephone calls onto the cheapest available line, there by liberalising the US Telecoms market after the AT&T breakup. It then introduced telephone directory software and word processing programs, as well as electronic mail functions.
Datapoint acquired pioneering hard disk drive manufacturer Data Disc in March 1977 for $2 million.
Other Datapoint inventions were ARCnet, invented in 1977, originally called ARC (Attached Resource Computer), which was an early token-passing local area network (LAN) protocol, and the PL/B high-level programming language, which was originally called Databus (from Datapoint business language) and ran under the Datashare multi-user interpreter. Later developments included a Mapped Intelligent Disc System (MIDS) which networked 2200 series terminals to a single mass storage disc operating system and enhanced Distributed Data Processing. Proprietary operating systems included DOS and RMS (Resource Management System). RMS was introduced alongside the 8800 processor in 1980, supporting controlled access to networked resources and the scaling of applications across processors. Datapoint later moved its hardware to be based on Intel 386 CPUs.
ARCnet was briefly superseded by ARCnetplus, which provided throughput of 20 Mbit/s and include options such as LiteLink which used infra-red technology to link systems in adjacent buildings. This was launched around the time 100 Mbit/s Ethernet arrived so never really took much market share, even though ARCnet used simple, slender co-axial cable, not Ethernet's thick yellow cable, and despite having a slower transmission-speed had superior throughput, and was much simpler to configure and operate (servers could be connected and disconnected without taking the network down or reconfiguring).
Datapoint also developed and patented one of the earliest picture-in-picture implementations of videoconferencing called MINX (Multimedia Information Network eXchange). It was also part of the first video visitation and arraignment systems. It has been suggested it made more money from lawsuits over patent infringements than through sales of the product. MINX could be used with conventional IBM-compatible PCs or with Datapoint's own VISTA-PC. The VISTA-PC was offered in a range of models with accompanying peripherals, employing the Intel 80186 processor and running MS-DOS. Emulating the Datapoint 8220 workstation and operating in a Resource Management System (RMS) environment, the VISTA-PC could run Datapoint's PRO-VISTA office automation suite, integrating it with MINX.