John Peers (born 1942) founded Logical Machine Corporation as John Peers and Company in September 1974. The company was Peers' fourth; he had recently sold off Allied Business Systems of London to
Trafalgar House in 1974. Peers sought to set up manufacturing in an agricultural zone in
Ukiah, California. Following a delay, caused in part by concerned residents, a 30,000-square-foot plant was raised in Burke Hill, three miles south of Ukiah. Prototypes of the ADAM were built in May 1974, based on specifications devised in October 1973. Peers had yet to patent the technology as of June 1975. The ADAM's central processing unit was bolted onto an 7-by-6-foot L-shaped
desk, on which rested its
terminal. Twenty units of the ADAM were installed between April 1975 and February 1976, A controversial print advertisement featuring a naked woman seated at an ADAM terminal—as a pastiche of
Adam and Eve—was recalled in early 1976 as a result of outcry from the
National Organization for Women. The company changed its name to Logical Machine Corporation (LOMAC) in October 1976 and moved its headquarters to a 26,000-square-foot building in
Sunnyvale, California, in anticipation of a ramping up of orders for the ADAM. For fiscal year 1977, the company earned $5 million in revenue. In December 1977, LOMAC acquired Byte, Inc.—the proprietor of
The Byte Shop, the first computer retail chain—from
Paul Terrell and Boyd Wilson for an unspecified amount. The Byte Shop had 65 locations in the
San Francisco Bay Area in 1978; it catered mainly to hobbyists with low cost
microcomputer kits, in contrast to the high cost of LOMAC's ADAM. By July 1978, however, LOMAC were able to reduce the price of the ADAM down to $15,000. The company by that point had shipped their 50th ADAM and expanded to 14 countries. Also in 1978, LOMAC acquired Mass Memory—a high-tech optical storage company based in
Phoenix, Arizona, whose products had storage capacities on the order gigabytes and terabytes—and Centigram, makers of the Mike—a computer with
speech recognition. Brandt had Logical absorb Mass Memory and Centigram into the parent operations, shutting down their respective plants in the process, converted 10 Byte Shops to
franchises and opened 25 more franchised Byte locations, and stopped direct sales of LOMAC's business computer products. By the beginning of 1979, LOMAC was profitable once more, and Brandt was let go from LOMAC. Peers left LOMAC in 1980, following a slump in the company's sales. He became an executive director of the United States Robotics Society, a consortium for
industrial automation companies, that year. Following Peers' departure, LOMAC changed its name to Logical Business Machines, adopting the name of its European subsidiary. In 1983, the company announced a 16-bit
clone of the
IBM PC, called the Logical L-XT, which featured a 10-MB hard drive, 320-KB floppy drive and 192 KB of
RAM, and a
real-time clock, and came shipped with various software (including
MS-DOS, a
word processor, and a
spreadsheet application) and an amber
CRT monitor. The following year, the company introduced L-NET, a
local area network system based on the L-XT that could link up to 64 computers. L-NET came shipped with a natural programming language, Diplomat—a descendant of the programming language used on the ADAM. In June 1983, Logical sued
Coleco Industries over
trademark infringement with the latter's to-be-released
Adam microcomputer. Logical cited confusion from their existing ADAM customer base caused by the announcement of the Coleco Adam as the basis for the suit. Coleco challenged Logical in the press, writing that Logical's rights to the
Adam trademark for use in computers had lapsed earlier in the year. The two settled out of court, with Coleco agreeing to license the Adam name from Logical in exchange for unlimited rights to the
Adam trademark. Logical halted development of the L-XT when they filed for
Chapter 11 bankruptcy in July 1984. The company had been $4 million in debt. They emerged from bankruptcy in September 1985, after being infused with $2 million from Carat Ltd. The latter immediately received a little less than 50 percent ownership in Logical—this stake set to grow to over 50 percent over the next six months. As part of the terms of exiting bankruptcy, Logical stopped manufacturing hardware and strictly became a
software development company and
value-added reseller of computer systems. ==References==