ComputerLand was a widespread chain of retail computer stores during the early years of the

microcomputer revolution The history of the personal computer as a mass-market consumer electronic device began with the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s. A personal computer is one intended for interactive individual use, as opposed to a mainframe computer where ...

, and was one of the outlets (along with Computer City and

Sears Sears, Roebuck and Co. ( ), commonly known as Sears, is an American chain of department stores founded in 1892 by Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck and reincorporated in 1906 by Richard Sears and Julius Rosenwald, with what began a ...

) chosen to introduce the IBM PC in 1981. The first ComputerLand opened in 1976, and the chain eventually included about 800 stores by 1985. After this time the rapid

commoditization In business literature, commoditization is defined as the process by which goods that have economic value and are distinguishable in terms of attributes (uniqueness or brand) end up becoming simple commodities in the eyes of the market or consum ...

of the PC led to the company's downfall, with most of the retail locations closing by 1990. The company officially ended in February 1999.

History

ComputerLand was founded by William H. Millard. In 1974 he launched a company, IMS Associates, Inc., to build what was claimed to be the first truly integrated personal computers, sold as kits to hobbyists and the rapidly growing numbers of retailers (through small ads in ''

Popular Electronics ''Popular Electronics'' was an American magazine published by John August Media, LLC, and hosted at TechnicaCuriosa.com. The magazine was started by Ziff-Davis Publishing Company in October 1954 for electronics hobbyists and experimenters. It soo ...

''). The computer, the

IMSAI 8080 The IMSAI 8080 was an early microcomputer released in late 1975, based on the Intel 8080 and later 8085 and S-100 bus. It was a clone of its main competitor, the earlier MITS Altair 8800. The IMSAI is largely regarded as the first "clone" mi ...

, may not have made Millard's fortune, but his resulting experiences with the inexperienced and under‑capitalized retailers did. In 1976 (at the same time as the

Byte Shop The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit ...

was selling its first few

Apples An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancestor, ' ...

) he asked his Sales Director, Ed Faber (an ex‑IBM Manager), to start a new franchise operation, soon to become ComputerLand. Faber first designed a pilot store, at Hayward, California, with the then-revolutionary concept of providing a "full service" store, offering under one roof all that the customer needed to support their PCs. Advertisement for Preview Opening of a Computer Shack store at 22634 Foothill Blvd, Hayward, CA, He then moved rapidly to set up franchising. The first franchisee was in Morristown, New Jersey, and was rapidly followed by a chain across the US. It set a pattern that dominated PC retailing for the next decade. By the time IBM arrived on the scene, the network of branches, all run by franchisees, had grown to 190 in number. By the end of 1985, when Millard retired, there were some 800 branches (including some 200 outside the US) and he had become one of the computer billionaires. Most ComputerLand stores succumbed to the predation of the "box-shifters" in the price wars of the latter 1980s, after the peak had passed. In 1987, Millard sold ComputerLand to E.M. Warburg, Pincus & Co. for US$200 million. In 1993, Merisel announced it would purchase the ComputerLand name and all franchise holdings and its Datago aggregation division for $110 million. The new Merisel ComputerLand unit was operated by the then-president of Computerland's franchise and distribution business,

Martin Wolf Martin Harry Wolf (born 16 August 1946 in London) is a British journalist of Austrian-Dutch descent who focuses on economics. He is the associate editor and chief economics commentator at the ''Financial Times''. Early life Wolf was born in ...

. The following year, "Vanstar" was selected as the name for the ComputerLand corporate company-owned stores stemming from the Nynex acquisition. (

Pleasanton, California Pleasanton is a city in Alameda County, California, United States. Located in the Amador Valley, it is a suburb in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area. The population was 79,871 at the 2020 census. In 2005 and 2007, Pleasanton wa ...

) after the sale of split-off franchisor to Merisel. In 1997 Synnex Information Technologies, a national distributor of microcomputers and communication, networking, peripheral and storage products, purchased substantially all the assets of Merisel FAB Inc., including the ComputerLand franchise. Synnex created ComputerLand Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Synnex, consisting of the ComputerLand and Datago businesses. On October 9, 1998, Inacom purchased Vanstar for a reported $465 – $480 million. The resulting company employed nearly 12,000 and was estimated to generate $7 billion in revenue. The acquisition of Vanstar reportedly added a large amount of debt, and it has been said that Inacom overpaid for a company of that size. Vanstar had 43.26 million shares outstanding at the time the deal was struck, and shareholders of Vanstar received .64 shares of ICO for each VST share in a stock swap deal, thus the issuance of 27.7 M shares of stock effectively more than doubled the number of outstanding shares while also being dilutive to the existing shares. This, plus debt concerns, led to a decline in the price of Inacom's stock.

Inacom Inacom Corporation (ICO:NYSE) was a large national seller of PC's and services based in Omaha, Nebraska, at one point being the third-largest and most profitable computer distributor in the United States. Origins The company created in 1991 from ...

Corporation ceased operations completely in 2000. Although the corporate ComputerLand ceased operations anStar many former franchises continue to operate today as independently owned computer businesses under the ComputerLand name.

References

External links

ComputerLand in France near Paris

COMPUTERLAND BelgiumChicago ComputerLandComputerLand of Silicon ValleyComputerLand of WoodbridgeComputerLand OttumwaComputerLand SavannahETC ComputerLand
Defunct computer hardware companies Companies based in Hayward, California Defunct companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Retail companies based in California

History

References

Further reading

External links