Their Victor 9000 PC competed directly against IBM's first model. The Victor had superior graphics, but was doomed 'cuz its floppy disk format was incompatible with IBM's.
Victor went public & burned through $30mm in one year. Still have a V9000 here in the Lab's vault. 768K of memory & a huge 10mb hard drive – enough for a lifetime of business letters, as everyone then believed.
Chuck Peddle was CEO. Victor previously made calculators, & had roots back to the Norden bombsight.
John Walker ported AutoCAD to the V9000 in time for the annual COMDEX trade show. The instant popularity gave Autodesk a powerful sales boost.
We loaned Stewart Brand a machine, so he could experiment with it while promoting his Whole Earth Catalog.
We used to stay at the Dream Inn on the beach in Santa Cruz, when attending quarterly managment meetings.
I went to an offsite meeting at Dream Inn in the mid-90s. Perfect for team building.