Alloy Computer Products is an Australian manufacturer of information technology products based near Melbourne. As of 2007, the company currently markets networking and VoIP products. The company was originally based in Framingham, Massachusetts and by 1990 was part of the Fortune 500. At one point Alloy was a major producer of QIC format tape drives and other computer peripherals. In the mid 90's the company was no longer profitable. It filed for bankruptcy in the U.S. and the Australian subsidiary was bought out by the management team from the Australian division. It no longer operates as a manufacturer or as an American corporation.
Alloy Computer Products, Inc., was founded in 1979. Alloy was initially founded to supply hard drive and tape backup systems for S-100 bus computers running CP/M. When IBM's PC was released Alloy entered that market to provide hard drive storage and tape backup to that marketplace. Alloy Computer Products later developed and marketed multi-user computer systems for the emerging microcomputer marketplace. Alloy later developed printing accelerator hardware.
In 1984 Alloy developed the PC-Slave card which consisted of an X86 (8086 or V30) processor, either 256k or 1 Meg of memory and two serial ports. This card used RTNX (later renamed NTNX) to use the host processor to act as a file server. Dumb PC-Term terminals were attached to the PC-Slave to allow the running of DOS programs. At the time it was much cheaper to use this solution rather than network multiple computers, but as computers and networking hardware became cheaper and cheaper, Alloy's advantage was overshadowed by the disadvantages of not being able to support graphics, etc. Alloy also developed a PC-Bus expansion bus system to allow the install of up to 32 PC-Slave cards attached to a single host PC. This allowed 32 user networks to be created, but each network was completely standalone.
Because of the knowledge learned by developing the PC-Slave card, in 1985 Alloy developed the DOS-73 co-processor board for the AT&T Unix-PC, allowing AT&T's Unix based Unix-PC (aka the PC-7300 and the 3B1) to run MS-DOS based programs.
Alloy grew to $50 million in annual sales by 1986 and executed a successful IPO in June of that year. Alloy had an installed base of 150,000 users by the early 1990s, largely small businesses, comprising a relatively significant portion of the multi-user DOS marketplace. One DOS based computer was equipped with a multi-user/multi-tasking operating system called "386/MultiWare" which along with specialized hardware could provide serial connectivity to up to 20 dumb terminal clients. Each dumb terminal was connected to a session running up to 8 concurrent DOS virtual machines, all running on the host computer. If a problem arose with a single DOS virtual machine it could be rebooted without an effect on other terminals attached. Later "MultiNode" was introduced to meet client needs operating under the Novell network operating system allowing both Client/Server network connectivity as well as serial terminal users.
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