Billings Computer Corporation was a publicly traded computer company and fully owned subsidiary of Billings Energy Corporation, a defunct American energy company based in Provo, Utah, that specialized in hydrogen fuel. Billings Computer was active between 1977 and 1985 and released several minicomputers and microcomputer systems.
History
Foundation (1973–1979) Roger Billings of Provo, Utah, founded Billings Computer in early 1977, four years after incorporating parent company Billings Energy Corporation. Billings Energy was a hydrogen fuel company that served as a springboard for Roger Billings and his associates' research; in the 1960s, the former earned a scholarship to Brigham Young University after winning an international high school science fair in 1965, with his project—a conversion of his father's Ford Model A into running on hydrogen. The company's computer subsidiary grew to be larger than its energy-focused parent company and made Billings a millionaire within three years of Billings Computer's incorporation. In March 1980, Billings designed a hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered forklift for the USDOS before moving the parent company to Independence, Missouri. Billings Computer remained in Provo, where its over 150 employees worked. This was six times the amount of employees in September 1977 but down from the subsidiary's peak headcount of 250 in September 1979.
The company's first computer system, the Data-Byte System 1, was announced in September 1977. It is a minicomputer based on the company's own design and was sold with the company's own dumb terminal, the B-100. The base system was sold with the central processing unit and front panel, the terminal, dual 8-inch floppy disk drives, and a bidirectional line printer. The system came shipped with its primary operating system and Fortran IV compiler. Optional was a memory module housing up to 1 MB of RAM, 50- and 300-MB hard disk drives, acoustic couplers, higher-speed printers, plotters, and ADC/DAC modules. Billings followed up their Data-Byte with the Billings Microsystem in February 1979. The Microsystem was an all-in-one microcomputer based on a 4 MHz Zilog Z80 microprocessor with 64 KB of RAM (8 KB definable as random-access or read-only), dual 5.25-inch floppy drives, and a 94-key keyboard. The Microsystem took US$1 million and four months to develop, over the final quarter of 1978. The company sold 100 units of the Microsystem into August 1979.
Growth (1979–1984) In the beginning of 1979, Billings Computer announced their pending acquisition of the disk drive division of Calcomp (California Computer Products Inc.) for $1.8 million. Billings were joined in their acquisition of Calcomp by Xerox and Sanders Associates, the former buying the vast majority of Calcomp's solid-state memory assets and the latter buying all other assets of Calcomp outright, including the trademark. The acquisition was finalized in May 1979. While Billings initially suggested that they would move Calcomp's disk drive operations in Anaheim, California, to Provo, they retracted their plans move immediately and kept the factory in Anaheim until 1981. The division was later renamed to Caldisk; Berne D. Broadbent was named its president.
While its parent company reported losses for fiscal year 1978, Billings Computer had raked in $466,000 in net profit on $2,495,000 sales in the second fiscal quarter of 1979 alone. In preparation of growing demand, Billings Computer in August 1979 announced the raising of a 50,000-square-foot factory in Trenton, Utah in which to house new assembly lines for their products. Even with their success, the larger Billings Energy Corporation had yet to turn a profit by mid-1980, and in October 1980, Billings laid off a large percent of Caldisk amid constricting cash flow in the company, as well as failure to receive necessary parts for disk drives from other companies in the sluggish early 1980s economy.