- Stac Electronics
Stac Electronics was an
engineering company founded in1983 by seven friends atCaltech . Originally headquartered in Pasadena,California and later in Carlsbad,California , the company developed interesting hardware and software technology, but struggled financially, until the release of Stackerdisk compression software in1990 . This product was a runaway hit in the days when disk drives had relatively small capacities (20 to 80 megabytes) and were very expensive. Stacker doubled disk capacity (on average), and usually increased disk performance by reducing the amount of data that had to be read or written. Stac sold several million units of Stacker over the product's lifetime.Microsoft lawsuit
In
1993 ,Microsoft releasedMS-DOS 6.0, which included a disk compression program calledDoubleSpace . Stac executives were outraged, as 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 sued [ [http://www.vaxxine.com/lawyers/articles/stac.html Complaint for patent infringement and Demand for jury trial] by Stac Electronics v Microsoft Corporation] Microsoft for infringement of two of its data compression patents, and won; in1994 , 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 Microsoft counterclaim that Stac had misappropriated the Microsoft trade secret of a pre-loading feature that was included in Stacker 3.1, and simultaneously awarded Microsoft $13.6 million on the counterclaim. [ [http://www.msversus.org/archive/stac.html Microsoft Loses Patent Suit] ,Associated Press , February 23, 1994]While Microsoft prepared an appeal, Stac was able to obtain a preliminary
injunction 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 its OEM 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.After 1994
At some time prior to 1996, the company relocated its main office from Carlsbad to Carmel Valley, in San Diego, and maintained a programming group in
Estonia . After settling the lawsuit with Microsoft, Stac struggled to find its way as a public company. The aftermarket for hard drive compression software collapsed with the rapid fall in price of larger capacity hard drives. It had some successes, perhaps most notably with an acquiredremote control product called "ReachOut ". It invented a disk-based backup product forworkstation s andlaptop s, and marketed this product first as "Replica NDM" and later as "eSupport Essentials". While this was happening, Stac decided to get out of the compression business completely, and reorganized its compression hardware and software unit into a subsidiary calledHifn , which it spun off in1998 .Stac then renamed itself to "Previo", and tried to reposition itself as a technology provider to
helpdesk and support organizations. This effort was pursued while thedot-com bubble was bursting, and in2002 the company finally threw in the towel. In an unusual move, rather than spend all its cash, the company sold off its technology (toAltiris ) and returned its cash to itsshareholders before dissolving.References
External links
* [http://web.archive.org/web/20051214104645/http://www.altiris.com/previo/ Previo support page on Altiris site]
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