Alpha Micro Named in $1.6-Million Lawsuit

A $1.6-million lawsuit alleging breach of contract, failure to live up to warranties and negligence has been filed against Alpha Microsystems by a Kansas City, Missouri-based agricultural cooperative.

The suit, filed in Federal District Court in Kansas by Farmland Industries Inc. stems from the purchases in 1983 and 1984 of computer hardware and software manufactured by Santa Ana-based Alpha Micro. The suit was filed in Kansas because many of Farmland’s members are located in that state.

The computer package was designed to be used for agriculture related business, but the computers and software purchased from Alpha Micro were incompatible, said Steve Dees, an attorney for the cooperative, which has 500,000 members in 19 states. “What basically happened,” he said, “is that we spent a lot of time and effort and got something that was unusable.”

A spokesman for Alpha Micro declined to comment on the lawsuit, but said such litigation is “not an uncommon sort of thing in our business.”