Stac Electronics, originally incorporated as State of the Art Consulting and later shortened to Stac, Inc., was a technology company founded in 1983. It is known primarily for its

Lempel–Ziv–Stac Lempel–Ziv–Stac (LZS, or Stac compression or Stacker compression) is a lossless data compression algorithm that uses a combination of the LZ77 sliding-window compression algorithm and fixed Huffman coding. It was originally developed by Stac ...

lossless compression Lossless compression is a class of data compression that allows the original data to be perfectly reconstructed from the compressed data with no loss of information. Lossless compression is possible because most real-world data exhibits statistic ...

algorithm and Stacker

disk compression A disk compression software utility increases the amount of information that can be stored on a hard disk drive of given size. Unlike a file compression utility, which compresses only specified files—and which requires the user to designate ...

utility for compressing data for storage.

History

The original founders included five

Caltech The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

graduate students in Computer Science (Gary Clow, Doug Whiting, John Tanner, Mike Schuster and William Dally), two engineers from the industry (Scott Karns and Robert Monsour) and two board members from the industry (Robert Johnson of Southern California Ventures and Hugh Ness of

Scientific Atlanta Scientific Atlanta, Inc. was a Georgia, United States-based manufacturer of cable television, telecommunications, and broadband equipment. Scientific Atlanta was founded in 1951 by a group of engineers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, an ...

). The first employee was Bruce Behymer, a Caltech undergraduate in Engineering and Applied Science. Originally headquartered in

Pasadena Pasadena ( ) is a city in Los Angeles County, California, northeast of downtown Los Angeles. It is the most populous city and the primary cultural center of the San Gabriel Valley. Old Pasadena is the city's original commercial district. Its ...

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

and later in Carlsbad,

, the company received venture capital funding to pursue a business plan as a fabless chip company selling application-specific standard products to the tape drive industry. The plan was to include expansion into the disk drive market, which was much larger than the tape drive market. Following the success of

Cirrus Cirrus may refer to: Science *Cirrus (biology), any of various thin, thread-like structures on the body of an animal *Cirrus (botany), a tendril *Infrared cirrus, in astronomy, filamentary structures seen in infrared light *Cirrus cloud, a type ...

in the disk drive market, this was the real basis for venture capitalists' interest in Stac. As part of the application engineering to adapt its data compression chips for use in disk drives, the company implemented a

DOS DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems. DOS may also refer to: Computing * Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel * Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicat ...

driver that transparently compressed data written to a PC hard disk and decompressed the data transparently upon subsequent hard disk reads. In doing so they discovered that given the relative speed difference between the PC processor and the disk drive access times, it was possible to perform the data compression in software, obviating the need for a data compression chip in every disk drive, as they were planning to produce. This DOS driver was written in

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 Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was introd ...

assembly language under contract by Paul Houle. In 1990 the company released Stacker, a

utility. The product was highly successful, due to the relatively small capacities (20 to 80 megabytes) and high prices of contemporary hard drives, at a time when larger software packages such as Microsoft's new Windows user interface were becoming popular. On average, Stacker doubled disk capacity, and usually increased disk performance by compressing the data before writing and after reading, compensating for the relative slowness of the drives. Stac sold several million units of Stacker over the product's lifetime. They also released a hardware product called ''STAC Coprocessor Card'', which claimed to not only improve the compression of the files, but to decrease the time needed to compress files. Salient Software would license Stac's acceleration technology for use in their

NuBus NuBus (pron. 'New Bus') is a 32-bit parallel computer bus, originally developed at MIT and standardized in 1987 as a part of the NuMachine workstation project. The first complete implementation of the NuBus was done by Western Digital for th ...

''DoubleUp'' and

PDS PD, P.D., or Pd may refer to: Arts and media * ''People's Democracy'' (newspaper), weekly organ of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) * ''The Plain Dealer'', a Cleveland, Ohio, US newspaper * Post Diaspora, a time frame in the ''Honorverse'' ...

''Bullet'' cards for the

Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...

, though they would use Salient's own

DiskDoubler DiskDoubler (DD) is a data compression utility for compressing files on the Apple Macintosh platform. Unlike most such programs, which compresses numerous files into a single archive for transmission, DiskDoubler is intended to compress single fil ...

software.

After 1994

At some time prior to 1996, the company relocated its main office from Carlsbad to Carmel Valley, in

San Diego San Diego ( , ; ) is a city on the Pacific Ocean coast of Southern California located immediately adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a 2020 population of 1,386,932, it is the List of United States cities by population, eigh ...

, and maintained a programming group in

Estonia Estonia, formally the Republic of Estonia, is a country by the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland across from Finland, to the west by the sea across from Sweden, to the south by Latvia, a ...

. After settling the lawsuit with Microsoft, Stac attempted to expand its product portfolio in the utility software segment by adding additional storage and communication titles through internal development and acquisition. The company scrambled to replace the revenues lost after the market for hard drive compression software collapsed with the inclusion of

DoubleSpace DriveSpace (initially known as DoubleSpace) is a disk compression utility supplied with MS-DOS starting from MS-DOS 6.0, version 6.0 in 1993 and ending in 2000 with the release of Windows Me. The purpose of DriveSpace is to increase the amount ...

in MS-DOS and the rapid decline in hard disk cost per megabyte. Using the funds from its

IPO An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investment ...

(1992) and the settlement with Microsoft, Stac acquired a

remote desktop software In computing, the term remote desktop refers to a software- or operating system feature that allows a personal computer's desktop environment to be run remotely off of one system (usually a PC, but the concept applies equally to a server or a ...

product called "

ReachOut Reach Out may refer to: In music: * ''Reach Out'' (Four Tops album), 1967 ** "Reach Out I'll Be There", also known as "Reach Out (I'll Be There)", a song by Four Tops * Reach Out (Burt Bacharach album), 1967 * ''Reach Out!'' (Hank Mobley album), ...

". It acquired a server image backup product, "Replica", and internally developed a network backup product for

workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term ''workstat ...

s and

laptop A laptop, laptop computer, or notebook computer is a small, portable personal computer (PC) with a screen and alphanumeric keyboard. Laptops typically have a clam shell form factor with the screen mounted on the inside of the upper li ...

s, and marketed this product first as "Replica NDM" and later as "eSupport Essentials". Much of the technology pioneered in Stac's network backup offering ultimately found its way into today's online backup solutions. Meanwhile, Stac's original chip business continued to grow. In order to realize shareholder value, its chip subsidiary called

Hifn Hifn (styled ''Hi/fn'') was a semiconductor manufacturer founded in Carlsbad, California, in 1996 as a corporate spin-off from Stac Electronics. The company was later headquartered in Los Gatos, California, and had offices in North America, Europ ...

, was spun off in 1998 in a primary public offering. Stac then renamed the remaining utility software company to "Previo", and repositioned itself as a

help desk A help desk is a department or person that provides assistance and information usually for electronic or computer problems. In the mid-1990s, research by Iain Middleton of Robert Gordon University studied the value of an organization's help desk ...

and support organization tool provider. This effort was pursued while the

dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compo ...

was bursting, and in 2002 management elected to take the unusual step of selling Stac's remaining technology assets (to

Altiris Altiris Inc. is a subsidiary of Symantec specializing in service-oriented management software which allows organizations to manage IT assets. They also provide software for web services, security, and systems management products. Established in ...

) and returning its remaining cash to

shareholders A shareholder (in the United States often referred to as stockholder) of a corporation is an individual or legal entity (such as another corporation, a body politic, a trust or partnership) that is registered by the corporation as the legal owner ...

before dissolving.

Controversy

Microsoft lawsuit

In 1993,

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

released

MS-DOS 6.0 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 ope ...

, which included a disk compression program called

. Microsoft had previously been in discussions with Stac to license its compression technology, and had discussions with Stac engineers and examined Stac's code as part of the

due diligence Due diligence is the investigation or exercise of care that a reasonable business or person is normally expected to take before entering into an agreement or contract with another party or an act with a certain standard of care. It can be a l ...

process. Stac, in an effort led by attorney

Morgan Chu Morgan Chu (born December 27, 1950), ( Chinese: 朱慶文; pinyin: Zhū Qìngwén) is an American intellectual property attorney. A high-school dropout, Chu went on to earn advanced degrees from Harvard, Yale and UCLA. In 2007, UCLA awarded Chu ...

, sued Microsoft for infringement of two of its data compression patents. Meanwhile, Microsoft had filed an injunction against Stac to prevent the company from selling its Stacker 3.1 software for Windows and DOS, attracting claims from Stac representatives that with a licensing deal having been made with rival DOS vendor, Novell, and with Microsoft no longer facing action from the Federal Communications Commission, the company had become emboldened to "dominate the data compression market". In 1994, a California jury ruled the infringement by Microsoft was not willful, but awarded Stac $120 million in compensatory damages, coming to about $5.50 per copy of MS-DOS 6.0 that had been sold. The jury also agreed with a Microsoft counterclaim that Stac had misappropriated the Microsoft trade secret of a pre-loading feature that was included in Stacker 3.1, and simultaneously awarded Microsoft $13.6 million on the counterclaim.Microsoft Loses Patent Suit
,

Associated Press The Associated Press (AP) is an American non-profit news agency headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1846, it operates as a cooperative, unincorporated association. It produces news reports that are distributed to its members, U.S. newspa ...

, 1994-02-23 While Microsoft prepared an appeal, Stac obtained a preliminary

injunction An injunction is a legal and equitable remedy in the form of a special court order that compels a party to do or refrain from specific acts. ("The court of appeals ... has exclusive jurisdiction to enjoin, set aside, suspend (in whole or in pa ...

from the court stopping the sales of all MS-DOS products that included DoubleSpace; by this time Microsoft had already started shipping an "upgrade" of MS-DOS to its

OEM An original equipment manufacturer (OEM) is generally perceived as a company that produces non-aftermarket parts and equipment that may be marketed by another manufacturer. It is a common industry term recognized and used by many professional or ...

customers that removed DoubleSpace. By the end of 1994, Microsoft and Stac settled all pending litigation by agreeing that Microsoft would make a $39.9 million investment in Stac Electronics, and additionally pay Stac about $43 million in royalties on their patents.

References

External links