(right) running on a
Macintosh 512K (left) Dayna Communications was founded by
William Sadleir in Salt Lake City in 1984, with $1.6 million in start-up capital. In May 1985, the company delivered the
MacCharlie, a hardware add-on for the
Macintosh 128K that was essentially a headless
IBM PC clone, complete with one or two 5.25-inch floppy drives, that clipped onto the side of the Mac. It connected to the Mac via a serial cable; users could run PC software through a terminal application provided through included floppy disks. The product received positive reviews, with
The New York Times calling it "a brilliant idea" that gave Apple the potential to "grow in businesses or households already committed to IBM hardware and software". The product was however a market failure, with Sadleir overspending on advertising while ignoring the needs of customers he had surveyed, the majority of which specifically wanted a means of transferring files captured in the IBM PC's
FAT filesystem to the Mac while not necessarily desiring a means of running IBM PC software on the Mac. Dayna nearly went bankrupt amid debt to creditors, but after securing $2.5 million in investment capital from
Norman Lear of
Act III Communications, Sadleir was able to avoid
Chapter 11 bankruptcy before releasing the FT100, a retooling of the MacCharlie that leaned on the file interoperability aspect of the MacCharlie while removing any unnecessary components. It sold for less than half the street price of the MacCharlie and even reused the latter's packaging. Released in November 1986, only 400 were sold within eight weeks, or a quarter of what the company expected to sell. By 1988, the company was up to about 30 employees and had monthly sales of between $600,000 and $800,000 that year. In 1990, Novell signed another agreement with Dayna for the latter to manufacture and market
LocalTalk-based Mac
network adapters for NetWare, replacing Novell's own offerings. By the mid-1990s Dayna was a recognized market leader for
fax and Ethernet modems for the Macintosh and
PowerBook. In September 1997,
Intel announced it would acquire Dayna Communications for roughly $14 million in a
stock swap. Most of its 73 staffers transferred over to Intel's headquarters, the latter seeking expertise in small-business networking products. Dayna was formally dissolved on December 28, 1998. ==References==