IRMA was available for immediate shipment. Pritt was looking at a product made by a company-Alpharetta, Georgia-based Data Communications Associates (DCA)-that was offering a product identical to the one he intended to make. Pritt foresaw great demand for this backward-looking technology, but his heart dropped while eating lunch at home.Īs he sat at his kitchen table, Pritt flipped through an issue of Computer World and saw an advertisement for IRMA. Further, the program would allow employees to access information on the mainframe without memorizing a long string of commands and performing as many as 15 different steps. By using a program that turned a personal computer's screen into a facsimile of a mainframe's old terminal, corporations could use both their existing equipment and invest in the future. Known as connectivity, or terminal emulation, the process of allowing mainframe computers to "talk" to personal computers and networks promised to be a big business as the computing revolution leaped forward. Pritt sought to bridge the gap separating the old technology with the new technology by developing a product that enabled desktops to emulate the monitor of a mainframe. Corporations were keen on incorporating desktop, or personal computers, within their operations, but they also were reluctant to give up their trusted mainframes. Pritt's intention was to create a company that made software capable of connecting mainframe computers to a fledgling but fast-growing breed of computers: the desktop. In December 1982, with the idea of starting Attachmate, Pritt composed his resignation letter from Harris Corp., mailed the letter to his boss in California, and left his sales and marketing position behind him. Pritt was retired when he launched his start-up company. Indeed, his first experience associated with Attachmate's founding was anxiety-ridden shock. And it's how Frank Pritt made a small fortune." Pritt, Attachmate's founder, could not have known he would make a fortune with his start-up venture. It's why the un-ergonomic Qwerty keyboard survives. That's why the United States hasn't embraced the metric system. In the Januissue of Forbes, Ann Marsh wrote: "A great barrier to new technologies is the investment people have in the old ones. Attachmate is managed and owned by its founder, Frank Pitt. Domestically, the company maintains offices in nearly 50 cities. The company operates on a global scale, serving customers in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Australia. Attachmate's customers are Fortune 500 corporations and federal and state governments. The company's strengths are in allowing personal computers to communicate with and to emulate mainframe computers, historically the primary repositories of corporate data. Attachmate Corporation is one of the largest privately held software companies in the world, operating as a developer of software for e-business and Web services technology.
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