ECD Corporation

ECD was founded in late 1974 by Ronald Todd, Jerry Roberts, and Richard Eckhardt, three graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).[2] Todd was named company president.[3] Eckhardt had taken entrepreneurial courses alongside his main studies at MIT, which he cited as helping the company get a head start in the electronics industry.[4] All three were later joined by Edward W. Costello, who became the company's marketing manager.[5] ECD was founded with $5,000 of capital; its first product was the C-meter, a capacitance meter with a liquid-crystal readout,[6] released in spring 1975.[7] The C-meter sold well and allowed the company to move onto their second project, a portable digital thermometer that ran on batteries.[6] Called the T-meter, it was a ruggedized thermometer allowing it to withstand extreme shock in day-to-day industrial transport. The T-meter had a system of thermistor probes, each of which plugged into the base of the unit and able to accurately measure a variety of temperature ranges.[8] The T-meter found widespread acceptance in scientific laboratories and industrial plants.[6] In 1976, ECD earned over US$200,000 in sales and had a backlog of orders worth $1,500,000.[4]

In late 1976,[9] the company announced the MicroMind, a microcomputer system that sold for a little over $980 (equivalent to $4,667 in 2021).[1] The MicroMind was a three-board system, including the central processor board, the display processor board, and the input/output board. The central processor board sports a MOS Technology's 6512 microprocessor that runs the computer's operating system and software; it also features 8 KB of RAM stock.[10] The display processor board contains 2.6 KB of display memory and a RF modulator, allowing a conventional television to be used as a monitor for the computer.[11] The input/output board meanwhile houses the MicroMind's power supply, which has power rails of +5 V and +12 V. The central processing board supports up to 16 KB of RAM; expansion cards were available allowing the computer's RAM to be upgraded in 32 KB intervals.[10]

The MicroMind additionally came shipped with an 80-key ASCII keyboard and various software. Such software packages included a BASIC interpreter with extended functionality (called notsoBASIC[12]), an interactive line editor, a machine code monitor, an assembler, and a cassette file browser. The computer also came packaged with two games: Conway's Game of Life and a "space war" game.[10] Much of ECD's software was written in BASIC by Bob Frankston, a software developer who worked with ECD on a freelance basis. Frankston would later join with Dan Bricklin to found Software Arts in 1979, developers of VisiCalc.[13] In May 1977, ECD won a $1.38 million contract to supply 1,000 MicroMinds across the nation for public schools. The deal was mediated through Avakian System Corporation, a computer consulting business of Glastonbury, Connecticut.[14] The MicroMind may or may not have been followed up with a MicroMind II.[12]

In July 1978, the company released the Smart ASCII, one of the first intelligent video terminals with a 132-column display.[15] A month later, they released a dialect of BASIC that was an extension of Dartmouth BASIC oriented toward small businesses, called ECD Business Basic.[16] Later in 1978, the company developed a bespoke physical specification of floppy disk. Called the Biflex, each disk had a diameter of 4.5 inches and could store up to 512 KB of data.[17]

ECD went defunct in 1983.[18]