Portable Computer Pioneer Bankrupt : Liquidation of Teleram Ordered
Teleram Communications Corp., the company that introduced the first successful portable computer a decade ago, has gone bankrupt. Analysts said it could not keep up with bigger companies with more market strength and cheaper, better computers.
Teleram’s assets will be liquidated to pay off creditors under a Chapter 7 proceeding that was approved by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Howard Schwartzberg in White Plains on Oct. 16, according to records on file in the court clerk’s office.
The White Plains-based company listed assets of about $1.5 million and liabilities of about $1.5 million in its Chapter 11 filing for protection from creditors. The court granted that protection Sept. 3, but the judge decided to convert it to Chapter 7 to satisfy creditors’ claims.
Chapter 11 allows a company breathing space to reorganize; Chapter 7 is outright dissolution.
Teleram was squeezed between Tandy Corp.’s Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 on the low end of the price scale and International Business Machines’ Personal Computer on the high end, said Charles Satuloff, president and co-founder of the defunct company.
“We were caught in a mousetrap,” Satuloff said.
Teleram’s portable computers changed life for traveling news reporters. Instead of dictating stories over the telephone or using a telecopier, they could write stories on a standard keyboard and transmit them rapidly over telephone lines to computers in their home offices, where their words could be directly set in type.
Satuloff said he is trying to arrange the creation of a company to repair and provide replacement parts for Teleram equipment, but plans are still indefinite.
Troubles With Repairs
He would not estimate how many customers are using Teleram equipment. Owners of Teleram computers said they had trouble getting their machines repaired even before the company went into Chapter 11.
Teleram’s first product, the P-1800, a word-processing terminal intended for newspapers, wire services and magazines, was introduced in 1975. In 1980, it introduced the Portabubble, a more powerful terminal with a unique storage device relying on magnetic particles, or “bubbles,” instead of a silicon chip.
Later it offered a portable computer that could be connected with a desk-top disk drive for memory storage and other devices, such as printers. Satuloff said the product was “every bit as powerful as IBM’s without the name.”
The company made a successful public stock offering in 1983, but that year marked the beginning of its downturn, Satuloff said.
“Teleram thought they had something unique and monumental. They were another me-too player in a hardware commodity business, and they just got washed up,” said Jonathan Art, an analyst for the Gartner Group, a high-technology research firm in Stamford, Conn.
Teleram suffered the fate of numerous other companies that “didn’t understand the marketplace,” said Steven Burrill, director of high-technology research for Arthur Young & Co. in New York.
“When the market looks attractive, the bigger players come in. They have a better product at a lower cost, the younger companies struggle, and not a lot of them survive,” Burrill said.
