Founded in mid-1981 by Robert Harp, who co-founded
Vector Graphic. Along with Harp, the firm was co-founded by Robert Steven Kramarz who at age 31 was employee #1 and General Manager. Daniel R. Carter was named as CEO a year later. By 1984, Corona employed 280 people. Corona Data System's first products were 5MB and 10MB external hard drives with interface cards and software to connect them to the
Apple II and the
IBM PC. The drives were sold under the brand name
Starfire (
Starfire 5 and
Starfire 10). The original Corona PC was later released in 1983. The company went on to develop and release additional desktop and portable PCs corresponding to the development of the
Intel x86 architecture through the
80386, as well a laser printer (the
LP300) and an
integrated desktop publishing system known as
Intellipress. The latter offered either
Aldus PageMaker or
Ventura Publisher as
software bundles. The laser printer was based on the
Canon CX engine, but unlike competing products from HP and Apple, the printer's
raster image processor was on an interface card inside the PC, which partially used the PC's processor for image processing thus reducing product cost.
IBM Lawsuit Corona claimed "Our systems run all software that conforms to IBM PC programming standards. And the most popular software does." In early 1984,
IBM sued Corona and
Eagle Computer for copyright violation of the IBM PC
BIOS. Corona settled with IBM by agreeing to cease infringement.
Corona PPC-400 Corona Portable PC Model PPC-400, arguably the most notable Corona computer, was introduced in 1984. The PPC-400 was remarkable for its elegant and clear
screen fonts. The desktop version was the PC-400.
Cordata After Daewoo acquired a 70% share in the company, Corona Data Systems was renamed Cordata in 1986 in order to reflect diversification and to try to distance itself from identification as just a "PC clone" manufacturer. Daewoo phased out the Cordata name in 1993.
In popular culture In the first season of the TV series,
Halt and Catch Fire, a fictional drama depicting the birth of the personal computer industry in the 1980s, the pivot of company Cardiff Electric resembles both the history of Corona Data Systems and
Compaq. Like Cardiff Electric's fictional pivot to become a PC manufacturer, Corona's actual history included founding by two individuals: a computer systems expert (Harp) and a marketing/sales executive (Kramarz), and design of a portable IBM PC-compatible. While Cardiff Electric and Compaq succeeded in fighting IBM's accusations of
copyright infringement with
clean room designed
BIOS, Corona did not. Also like Cardiff, Corona Data Systems in 1985 sold a majority share to a conglomerate (
Daewoo Group). ==Competitors==