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Beyond the place of the big time computer industry whose lie the little guys, the high tech original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) who have acted as suppliers to the IBMs, Hewlett Packards and Apples. As sales in the mid-eighties have slumped for everyone, many OEMs now find themselves on their own, without the single customer around whom they originally built their business.
Such is the case with Vermont Microsystems in Winooski. IBM's patronage made the company's sales jump from $1.5 million to $18.5 million in two years, but then IBM stopped placing orders.
IBM can't really be blamed; sales for VMI's graphic controllers never materialized, so orders slowed to a trickle.
In the spring of 1985, VMI sat in 25,000 square feet of newly rented space with 110 employees and a lot of great ideas, but no money. It became a struggle just to survive over the next year and a half, but recently things have begun to look better with the influx of millions of dollars of venture capital.
The new struggle will not be to live from day to day, but to make good on the promise of its great ideas, while making the transition from an entrepreneur-managed company to an investor-managed one.
Brought into the world in 1980 by IBM alumni Jim Richards and Claude Domingue, VMI first acted as a subcontractor for a number of products to various high tech companies. It soon found a niche in the booming computer field: high end graphics control systems.
In early 1984 VMI beat out two other firms in bidding on developing graphics capability for the new IBM PC-AT.
"The company did a development for IBM to their specs, and that development really introduced professional-level graphics" to personal computers, said Charles Dickenson, newly appointed chief operating officer at the Winooski company.
What VMI had created was a circuit board that could be inserted into an existing PC that had a color monitor. It offered engineers and architects quality approaching that of a $50,000-plus computer-aided design station, for under $10,000, including software.
VMI set the "benchmark" in the microcomputer graphic processor market with its work for IBM, according to Sohail Malik, a computer industry analyst of DataQuest, the high tech market analysis subsidiary of Dunn and...