Imagineering Australia

Imagineering was a software distribution company founded by

Jodee Rich John David "Jodee" Rich (born 1960) is an Australian businessman. He was a founder of the defunct mobile phone provider One.Tel and the software distributor Imagineering Australia. He is now the CEO and founder of social analytics and influ ...

in the early 1980s. It grew rapidly before running into financial trouble in the late 1980s. Imagineering was sold to

First Pacific First Pacific Company Limited () is a Hong Kong-based investment management and holding company with operations located in Asia. It involves telecommunications, consumer food products and infrastructure. History * 1981: First Pacific Finance ...

in 1990 at which time

left the business. Graham Pickles, managing director of sister company

Tech Pacific Tech Pacific functioned as an Asian-Pacific IT wholesale distributor with offices throughout Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, India and Hong Kong. Jim Kennedy founded Tech Pacific in Melbourne, Australia in 1985. The org ...

, took the helm of the group and merged the two businesses together under the Tech Pacific banner in 1990. The company was most famous for distributing the following product ranges: *

Lotus Software Lotus Software (called Lotus Development Corporation before its acquisition by IBM) was an American software company based in Massachusetts; it was "offloaded" to India's HCL Technologies in 2018. Lotus is most commonly known for the Lotus 1-2- ...

* Ashton-Tate * AST *

Wyse WYSE (970 AM) is a radio station located in Canton, North Carolina, that simulcasts WISE's sports format from Asheville, North Carolina. Owned by the Asheville Radio Group subsidiary of Saga Communications, the station is licensed by the Fede ...

Control Data Control Data Corporation (CDC) was a mainframe and supercomputer firm. CDC was one of the nine major United States computer companies through most of the 1960s; the others were IBM, Burroughs Corporation, DEC, NCR, General Electric, Honeywell ...

(Storage Products only) * Mountain Computer * Seagate *

3Com 3Com Corporation was an American digital electronics manufacturer best known for its computer network products. The company was co-founded in 1979 by Robert Metcalfe, Howard Charney and others. Bill Krause joined as President in 1981. Metcalfe e ...

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the devel ...

* NetComm In addition, the company maintained a factory in

Taipei Taipei (), officially Taipei City, is the capital and a special municipality of the Republic of China (Taiwan). Located in Northern Taiwan, Taipei City is an enclave of the municipality of New Taipei City that sits about southwest of the ...

Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the northe ...

, where it manufactured its own line of

Personal computer A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or tech ...

s under the "Ultra By Imagineering" brandname. The majority of these were based on components manufactured by DTC computer. These machines proved very popular with home and small business users in Australia and

New Zealand New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 List of islands of New Zealand, smaller islands. It is the ...

, because of their low entry price, the availability of telephone support and full service in case of failure. A rough chronology of the Ultra product family was: Mid 1987: The original Ultra XT was created by Tony Ianuzzelli. It used a 6 MHz

8088 The Intel 8088 ("''eighty-eighty-eight''", also called iAPX 88) microprocessor is a variant of the Intel 8086. Introduced on June 1, 1979, the 8088 has an eight-bit external data bus instead of the 16-bit bus of the 8086. The 16-bit registers and ...

CPU A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, an ...

, was supplied with 640KB of

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to: Animals * A male sheep * Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish People * Ram (given name) * Ram (surname) * Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director * RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch ...

, a single 5.25"

floppy disk A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a diskette) is an obsolescent type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined ...

ette drive, CGA graphics and an optional 20Mb

hard disk drive A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magn ...

. June 1988: The second generation Ultra XT was created by Lindsay Vagg. CPU speed was now 8 MHz, and an EGA display was available. December 1988: Chris Moran and Carlo Incorvia created the Ultra AT. A "Baby-AT" chassis with 10 MHz 80286 CPU, 1MB RAM, EGA or

VGA Video Graphics Array (VGA) is a video display controller and accompanying de facto graphics standard, first introduced with the IBM PS/2 line of computers in 1987, which became ubiquitous in the Personal computer, PC industry within three years ...

graphics (using Twinhead company cards). All models had either 20 or 40MB half-height hard drives. June 1989: Chris Moran created the second generation Ultra AT. CPU Speed increased to 12 MHz, and 80 - 141MB hard drive options were offered. November 1989: The MyPC, basically an Ultra XT using cut-price components and secondhand CPUs in brightly coloured chassis, was released for sale through

Grace Brothers Grace Bros was an Australian department store chain, founded in 1885. It was bought by Myer (later Coles Myer) in 1983. There were 25 stores across New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory plus a few in Victoria, until they were ...

and Myer stores at

Christmas Christmas is an annual festival commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ, observed primarily on December 25 as a religious and cultural celebration among billions of people around the world. A feast central to the Christian liturgical year ...

. Other machines were developed, but never released for sale. These included: *The Ultra 386. This was eventually replaced by an OEM

Intel 80386 The Intel 386, originally released as 80386 and later renamed i386, is a 32-bit microprocessor introduced in 1985. The first versions had 275,000 transistors motherboard A motherboard (also called mainboard, main circuit board, mb, mboard, backplane board, base board, system board, logic board (only in Apple computers) or mobo) is the main printed circuit board (PCB) in general-purpose computers and other expand ...

in the Ultra AT chassis. *Gallileo: A high-end server for

networks, using a 25 MHz 80386 processor and up to 2 141MB

SCSI Small Computer System Interface (SCSI, ) is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices. The SCSI standards define commands, protocols, electrical, optical and logical interface ...

Hard Drives {{Ict-company-stub Software companies of Australia