Tallgrass Technologies
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Tallgrass Technologies Corporation was the first manufacturer to offer a
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 ...
product for the IBM PC. Tallgrass was a Kansas City based microcomputer hardware and
software Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. ...
company founded in December 1980 by David M. Allen. The hard disk drive product was initially sold in Computerland stores, alongside the original IBM PC. Tallgrass added tape-backup systems to its product line in 1982. Tallgrass was significant in the history of the PC because IBM shipped its PCs for almost two years without any hard-drive option. The IBM name attracted the makers of larger, professional software products that required a hard-drive's speed and capacity. The early availability of the Tallgrass hard-drives enabled those software products to make earlier entrances into the PC market. The parallel introductions, of the IBM PC with the Tallgrass hard-drive, catalyzed the growth of the PC market compared to what it would have been without the hard-drive option. Tallgrass was one of Seagate's earliest customers, initially purchasing
ST-506 The ST-506 and ST-412 (sometimes written ST506 and ST412) were early hard disk drive products introduced by Seagate in 1980 and 1981 respectively, that later became construed as hard disk drive interfaces: the ST-506 disk interface and the ST-41 ...
drives from Shugart Technology before the name changed to Seagate. The Tallgrass product was designed around the ST-506 hard drive, which required a separate controller between the drive and the computer (unlike hard drives today.) Tallgrass also briefly bought ST-506 drives from Seagate's licensee,
Texas Instruments Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) is an American technology company headquartered in Dallas, Texas, that designs and manufactures semiconductors and various integrated circuits, which it sells to electronics designers and manufacturers globa ...
. Later, Tallgrass bought most of its drives from Miniscribe and for a while was Miniscribe's largest customer.


History

While at a previous employer, Allen had developed a floppy
disk controller {{unreferenced, date=May 2010 The disk controller is the controller circuit which enables the CPU to communicate with a hard disk, floppy disk or other kind of disk drive. It also provides an interface between the disk drive and the bus conne ...
and, in early 1980, a prototype hard
disk controller {{unreferenced, date=May 2010 The disk controller is the controller circuit which enables the CPU to communicate with a hard disk, floppy disk or other kind of disk drive. It also provides an interface between the disk drive and the bus conne ...
. Both used an unusual, all-digital
phase-locked loop A phase-locked loop or phase lock loop (PLL) is a control system that generates an output signal whose phase is related to the phase of an input signal. There are several different types; the simplest is an electronic circuit consisting of a ...
data-separator that he patented. Both controller designs used GCR-encoding, which supported slightly higher linear densities and enabled higher storage capacities than conventional MFM. During a recession, in December 1980 Allen left that employer to form Tallgrass, with his former employer's permission to take the controller designs and another employee, a programmer, with him. Tallgrass' initial revenue stream in 1981 was provided by a contract with SofTech Microsystems for development of the 68000 interpreter for the
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 (U ...
software system. Allen had previously written the 6809 interpreter for
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 (U ...
, before starting Tallgrass. By the spring of 1981 the hard
disk controller {{unreferenced, date=May 2010 The disk controller is the controller circuit which enables the CPU to communicate with a hard disk, floppy disk or other kind of disk drive. It also provides an interface between the disk drive and the bus conne ...
design was complete. Tallgrass initially tried marketing Allen's unorthodox hard
disk controller {{unreferenced, date=May 2010 The disk controller is the controller circuit which enables the CPU to communicate with a hard disk, floppy disk or other kind of disk drive. It also provides an interface between the disk drive and the bus conne ...
alone, to system manufacturers. In mid-1981 it was decided to instead market a complete, external hard-disk subsystem (hard-drive + controller) to computer dealers. Tallgrass first developed subsystems for the
Xerox 820 The Xerox 820 Information Processor is an 8-bit desktop computer sold by Xerox in the early 1980s. The computer runs under the CP/M operating system and uses floppy disk drives for mass storage. The microprocessor board is a licensed variant of th ...
computer, for an
Alpha Microsystems Alpha Microsystems, Inc., often shortened to Alpha Micro, was an American computer company founded in California in 1977. The company was founded in 1977 in Costa Mesa, California, by John French, Dick Wilcox and Bob Hitchcock. During the dot-co ...
computer, and was working on an
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version when IBM announced the PC in August 1981. A partner in the local, Lenexa, Kansas Computerland store, Jim Fricke, gave Allen access to their IBM PC demonstrator when it arrived on a Friday, a few weeks before IBM's PCs became available for sale. Allen needed to develop an interface-card and a device-driver to give the PC a connection to and access to the Tallgrass subsystem. Allen discovered Tallgrass had already developed the IBM PC DOS device driver. As part of the previous development of its subsystem for the Alpha Microsystems computer, Tallgrass had developed a device driver for Seattle Computer Products' 86-DOS operating system. 86-DOS was renamed PC DOS when
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, Washin ...
bought the rights and licensed it to IBM. With information gleaned from Computerland's IBM PC demonstrator, Allen designed and built a prototype interface card over the weekend and successfully tested the card and the PC DOS driver in the store on the following Monday. Tallgrass was able to supply its hard disk subsystems for the PC, in production quantities, at the same moment that IBM started revenue shipments of PCs in October. This was because Tallgrass' product was already in production and needed only the simple interface card and PC DOS driver software to attach it to the IBM PC. The same Computerland store's other partner, Bruce Burdick, was a member of the Computerland chain's New Products Committee and helped get the Tallgrass product embraced by Computerland nationwide. With IBM's entry into the market, Allen invited a friend, Steven B. Volk to join Tallgrass as Executive V.P. of Sales and Marketing. Volk was Tallgrass' fourth employee, hired at the end of 1981 after he finished dental school. Volk assembled a sales organization and started an advertising campaign, initially incorporating pictures of macaws that he and his wife raised in their home. With the support of Computerland and helped by high gross margins of up to 35%, Tallgrass grew very rapidly. Early in 1982, Allen added a tape backup product to the product line, another first for PCs. This first tape-backup product used out-sourced Archive Corporation tape drive mechanisms and 3M cartridges. Later, Tallgrass opened a facility in Boulder, Co., to develop and manufacture smaller tape-backup drives. Allen's patented, all-digital
phase-locked loop A phase-locked loop or phase lock loop (PLL) is a control system that generates an output signal whose phase is related to the phase of an input signal. There are several different types; the simplest is an electronic circuit consisting of a ...
circuit was used once again, this time in controlling the speed of the tape-drive's motor. The manufacturing cost of the disk and tape controllers was low because Allen's unorthodox controller design was shared by both disk and tape and, being 100% digital including the data-separator, it was easily reduced to a single LSI microchip. Gross revenue peaked in mid-1985 at an annualized rate of $70M and there were 400 employees at the start 1986. By this time significant competition had arrived and Tallgrass' sales had plateaued. To finance Volk's plan to revive sales growth with an enlarged marketing push, Allen accepted the overtures of venture capital. In mid-1986, Gateway Associates L.P. in St. Louis took the lead and brought in the major investor, Reimer and Koger Assoc., pension fund advisor for KPERS (the Kansas Public Employees Retirement System.) Sales continued to falter and profits sagged while management and investors disagreed over a course of action. In mid-1987 the investors forced Allen out and took control of the company. Volk left later the same year to go to PrairieTek. Allen brought the investors a $4M buyout offer from
CMS Enhancements CMS Enhancements Inc. (originally Complete Management Systems) was an American computer company headquartered in Irvine, California. Founded in 1983, the company's main product lines in the 1980s were internal and external hard drives and tape d ...
, a California competitor. A letter of intent was signed in July but allowed to expire in August. By November 1987 the investments reportedly totaled $7M, employment was down to 130, and annual sales revenue far below $40M. Tallgrass had 1992 sales of $9.3M and was "said to be profitable." In 1993 the investors sold what was left of Tallgrass to Exabyte Corp. for $1.5M. By that time, KPERS investments in Tallgrass totaled over $14M. Not long after the acquisition, Exabyte sold the "Tallgrass Technologies" name to the former Tallgrass V.P. of International Sales, Jim Worrell, who then renamed his own import/export company using the Tallgrass name. Today his company has new ownership and a different charter but continues operating under the Tallgrass Technologies LLC name.


References

{{reflist, 30em


External links


Inc. Magazine, "The Spirit of Independence," July 1, 1985, Curtis Hartman (bottom of page)

Byte Magazine advertisement, September, 1983



Dash, Inc.
Software companies based in Kansas Software companies of the United States