Faraday Electronics was founded in 1982 in
Palo Alto, California, by Jack Watts, Joseph Sullivan, Robert Todd, and Larry Jones. The co-founders were the owners of the Portola Corporation, a business management firm based in
San Mateo, California. Watts, Faraday's principal founder who also had prior experience at
Hewlett-Packard in their manufacturing department, left Portola in the early 1980s to join
International Video Corporation as that company's vice president. In March 1983, Faraday announced the FE6400 (originally the Model 64), a
motherboard that was compatible with the
IBM Personal Computer. The FE6400 featured an
Intel 8088 clocked at 4.77 MHz, 64 KB of
RAM stock, and five
ISA expansion slots. Released in late 1983, the FE6400 was the first IBM PC–compatible motherboard that was available to third parties; previous clone motherboards were pre-built into complete clone systems and were not sold separately. Faraday designed the motherboard and its
BIOS chip from the ground up, while outsourcing manufacturing to
Flextronics in the United States and Singapore. In October 1983, Watts was replaced as CEO by John Lemons, who was formerly the president of
Teledyne Semiconductor. Watts remained on the board of directors. In January 1985, Faraday introduced the Bus PC, a
single-board implementation of an IBM PC built into a full-length ISA card that plugged into an ISA
backplane. It featured integrated serial and parallel ports and supported up to 256 KB of memory. It was the first use of a VLSI chipset in a PC-compatible single-board computer. That same month, Faraday shipped the first motherboard compatible with IBM's
Personal Computer AT. Called the A-Tease, it sported an
Intel 80286 processor, either 640 KB or 1 MB of RAM, and integrated parallel and serial ports. By the end of 1985, Faraday reported a profit on $12 million in sales. Simultaneously, Faraday began repositioning itself as a chipset vendor for manufacturers of
industrial process control systems, shying away from the commodity PC motherboard segment that C&T overwhelmingly dominated. The acquisition was finalized in July 1987, Faraday's owners receiving $42 million in stock. ==References==