Eagle Computer

Eagle Computer of Los Gatos, California was an early microcomputer manufacturing company. Spun off from Audio-Visual Laboratories (AVL), it first sold a line of popular CP/M computers which were highly praised in the computer magazines of the day. After the IBM PC was launched, Eagle produced the Eagle 1600 series, which ran MS-DOS but were not true clones. When it became evident that the buying public wanted actual clones of the IBM PC, even if a non-clone had better features, Eagle responded with a line of clones, including a portable. The Eagle PCs were always rated highly in computer magazines.

On June 8, 1983, the day of Eagle's initial public offering, its president, Dennis Barnhart, was killed in a crash of his new Ferrari. (He had just taken a yacht salesman to lunch.) There was a succession plan in place which resulted in the assumption of the CEO position by Ronald Mickwee. As news of Barnhart's death spread, the underwriters reversed the IPO, refunding the money that investors had paid for the stock, and held another IPO a few months later, which was unprecedented in the PC industry. This dramatic timing has led people to suppose that this event caused the end of Eagle. In fact, the company continued to lead PC sales until IBM launched a multi-party lawsuit against every company that made PC clones, claiming copyright infringement of the BIOS in its machines. Unable to match IBM's resources, all the companies named settled out of court. This led to the founding of third-party companies that sold BIOSes to computer manufacturers.

Eagle rewrote its BIOS, but it never regained its lost sales. In what was a pioneering effort at the time, an initiative was launched to create a new market selling Eagles to China. This effort eventually fell through and the company, like many others impacted by the BIOS copyright restrictions, was ultimately unable to recover and was out of business by 1986.