Omnidata Corporation was an American computer company active from 1978 to the late 1980s. The company was founded in

Westlake Village, California Westlake Village is a city in Los Angeles County, California, on its western border with Ventura County. Upon its incorporation in 1981, Westlake Village became the 82nd municipality of Los Angeles County.Baker, Pam (2002). ''Thousand Oaks We ...

, by Paul Van Alstyne in the aftermath of his company Wordplex being acquired by the

Canada Development Corporation The Canada Development Corporation was a Canadian corporation, based in Toronto, created and partly owned by the federal government and charged with developing and maintaining Canadian-controlled companies in the private sector through a mixture o ...

. Like Wordplex, Omnidata primarily focused on the design and manufacturing of

word processing A word processor (WP) is a device or computer program that provides for input, editing, formatting, and output of text, often with some additional features. Word processor (electronic device), Early word processors were stand-alone devices dedicate ...

computer systems, whether they were sold by Omnidata themselves or provided to other companies to resell. In 1984, they released the Omni Convertible, a microcomputer system that supports up to three microprocessors, of differing architectures—including

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel, based on the 8086 microprocessor and its 8-bit-external-bus variant, the 8088. Th ...

m68k The Motorola 68000 series (also known as 680x0, m68000, m68k, or 68k) is a family of 32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessors. During the 1980s and early 1990s, they were popular in personal computers and workstations and w ...

Z80 The Zilog Z80 is an 8-bit microprocessor designed by Zilog that played an important role in the evolution of early personal computing. Launched in 1976, it was designed to be software-compatible with the Intel 8080, offering a compelling altern ...

, and

TMS9900 The TMS9900 was one of the first commercially available single-chip 16-bit microprocessors. Introduced in June 1976, it implemented Texas Instruments's TI-990 minicomputer architecture in a single-chip format, and was initially used for low-end ...

—running simultaneously.

History

Omnidata was founded in December 1978 in

, by Paul Van Alstyne. Van Alstyne had previously co-founded , a manufacturer of

computer systems also based in Westlake Village, in 1974. At Wordplex, Van Alstyne served as president; he and his team developed word processors that directly competed against

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

's offerings at the time. From 1974 to 1978, Omnidata grew from 20 employees to 200 and was the second-largest manufacturer of word processor computers, behind only IBM. In July 1978, they were acquired in full by the

(CDC)—already a principal investor in the company—and merged with AES Data Ltd. of

Montreal Montreal is the List of towns in Quebec, largest city in the Provinces and territories of Canada, province of Quebec, the List of the largest municipalities in Canada by population, second-largest in Canada, and the List of North American cit ...

to become AES Wordplex. (CDC later sold off AES Wordplex to

Norsk Data Norsk Data was a minicomputer manufacturer located in Oslo, Norway. Existing from 1967 to 1998, it had its most active period from the early 1970s to the late 1980s. At the company's peak in 1987, it was the second largest company in Norway and em ...

in 1987.) As a design consultant, Omnidata's first client was

Triumph-Adler TA Triumph-Adler GmbH (formerly TA Triumph-Adler AG) is a German office equipment manufacturer based in Nuremberg and founded in 1896. The company currently manufactures computer printers and other document management systems. The company is no ...

(TA) of Germany. In April 1979, they released the Bitsy line of word processor systems, designed in part by Omnidata and manufactured by TA's subsidiary Diehl Data Systems. As a result of their partnership, TA invested significant capital in Omnidata, eventually owning a 46-percent stake in the company by early 1981. In 1980, Omnidata released their first word processing system, the Omni/1, which included two Shugart 5.25-inch floppy drives and a

Qume Qume was a manufacturer of daisy-wheel printers originally located in Hayward, California, later moving to San Jose. Around 1980, it also opened a manufacturing facility in Puerto Rico. It once dominated the daisy-wheel market. As the market f ...

daisy wheel printer Daisy wheel printing is an impact printing technology invented in 1970 by Andrew Gabor at Diablo Data Systems. It uses interchangeable pre-formed type elements, each with typically 96 glyphs, to generate high-quality output comparable to pre ...

. Omnidata manufactured the systems and developed the software entirely from their Westlake Village plant. As their end of the Bitsy deal, however, Diehl Data Systems had a hand in designing some of the Omni/1's hardware. The Omni/1 was powered by

Texas Instruments Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) is an American multinational semiconductor company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. It is one of the top 10 semiconductor companies worldwide based on sales volume. The company's focus is on developing analog ...

microprocessor. In July 1980, Omnidata leased a second building in Westlake Village dedicated to the company's direct sales division. After unveiling it at the 1980 Hanover Fair, Omnidata delivered the Omni/2, a general-purpose microcomputer also based on the TMS9900 processor, in December that year. In April 1981, TA purchased the remaining shares in Omnidata, acquiring the company outright and making it a subsidiary of TA. TA had been purchased by

Volkswagen AG Volkswagen AG (), known internationally as the Volkswagen Group, is a German public multinational conglomerate manufacturer of passenger and commercial vehicles, motorcycles, engines and turbomachinery. Headquartered in Wolfsburg, Lower Saxony ...

earlier in 1980, making Omnidata for a brief period a second-order subsidiary of VW. As part of the acquisition, Van Alstyne was promoted to manager of TA's word processing division, directing the development of the

Royal Royal may refer to: People * Royal (name), a list of people with either the surname or given name * A member of a royal family or Royalty (disambiguation), royalty Places United States * Royal, Arkansas, an unincorporated community * Royal, Ill ...

brand in the United States and the TA brand in Europe. TA under VW later absorbed Omnidata into their Royal Business Machines subsidiary in 1981. In early January 1983, as part of VW's reorganization of Triumph-Adler, Omnidata was spun off into a separate company once again. Now on their own, Omnidata began developing the Omni Convertible, an ambitious 16-bit microcomputer that featured support for multiple differing microprocessor architectures running simultaneously. A

Zilog Zilog, Inc. is an American manufacturer of microprocessors, microcontrollers, and application-specific embedded System on a chip, system-on-chip (SoC) products. The company was founded in 1974 by Federico Faggin and Ralph Ungermann, who were soo ...

Z80H located on its motherboard runs the built-in

machine code monitor A machine code monitor ( machine language monitor) is software that allows a user to enter commands to view and change memory address, memory locations on a computer, with options to load and save memory contents from/to secondary storage. Some f ...

, while co-processors occupy their own dedicated

Multibus Multibus is a computer bus standard used in industrial systems. It was developed by Intel Corporation and was adopted as the IEEE 796 bus. The Multibus specification was a robust industry standard with a relatively large form factor, allowing ...

card, slotting into one of the four available 16-bit Multibus ports on the Convertible's motherboard. Unveiled at the 1983 CES in November and released to the general public in January 1984, the Omni Convertible came stock with one co-processor card containing Texas Instruments' TMS9995. This card was responsible for running Omnidata's proprietary word processing software suite, Omnitext—on top of their proprietary disk operating system, Omni-DOS—as well as acting as a controller for the keyboard and serial and parallel ports. Optional co-processor cards included

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

-based

80186 The Intel 80186, also known as the iAPX 186, or just 186, is a microprocessor and microcontroller introduced in 1982. It was based on the Intel 8086 and, like it, had a 16-bit external data bus multiplexed with a 20-bit address bus. The 80188 ...

and

80286 The Intel 80286 (also marketed as the iAPX 286 and often called Intel 286) is a 16-bit microprocessor that was introduced on February 1, 1982. It was the first 8086-based CPU with separate, non-multiplexed address and data buses and also the fi ...

and

Motorola Motorola, Inc. () was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois. It was founded by brothers Paul and Joseph Galvin in 1928 and had been named Motorola since 1947. Many of Motorola's products had been ...

68000 The Motorola 68000 (sometimes shortened to Motorola 68k or m68k and usually pronounced "sixty-eight-thousand") is a 16/32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessor, introduced in 1979 by Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector ...

. While only up to three cards could be operated at the same time, this allowed users to run a combination of

CP/M CP/M, originally standing for Control Program/Monitor and later Control Program for Microcomputers, is a mass-market operating system created in 1974 for Intel 8080/Intel 8085, 85-based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Dig ...

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few op ...

UCSD Pascal UCSD Pascal is a Pascal programming language system that runs on the UCSD p-System, a portable, highly machine-independent operating system. UCSD Pascal was first released in 1977. It was developed at the University of California, San Diego (UC ...

Xenix Xenix is a discontinued Unix operating system for various microcomputer platforms, licensed by Microsoft from AT&T Corporation. The first version was released in 1980, and Xenix was the most common Unix variant during the mid- to late-1980s. T ...

, Omni-DOS seamlessly and simultaneously. Omnidata released no new computer systems after 1984 and let their trademark lapse in 1988.

References

{{Olivetti 1979 establishments in California 1988 disestablishments in California American companies established in 1979 American companies disestablished in 1988 Computer companies established in 1979 Computer companies disestablished in 1988 Defunct computer companies based in California Defunct computer companies of the United States Defunct computer hardware companies Defunct computer systems companies Word processors

History

See also

References