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 influe ...

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 Financ ...

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 * 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 Fed ...

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, Honeywel ...

(Storage Products only) *

Mountain Computer Mountain Computer, Inc. (also known as Mountain Hardware) was a privately held American computer peripheral manufacturer active as an independent company from 1977 to 1988. In its early years, the company chiefly developed products for the Appl ...

* 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. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

* 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 nort ...

, 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 tec ...

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 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island count ...

, 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 a ...

CPU, 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 diskette 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 magne ...

. 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 PC industry within three years. The term can no ...

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

networks, using a 25 MHz 80386 processor and up to 2 141MB SCSI Hard Drives {{Ict-company-stub Software companies of Australia