Pertec Computer

Pertec Computer Corporation (PCC), formerly Peripheral Equipment Corporation (PEC), was a computer company based in Chatsworth, California which originally designed and manufactured peripherals such as floppy drives, tape drives, instrumentation control and other hardware for computers.

Pertec's most successful products were hard disk drives and tape drives, which were sold as OEM to the top computer manufacturers, including IBM, Siemens and DEC. Pertec manufactured multiple models of seven and nine track half-inch tape drives with densities 800CPI (NRZI) and 1600CPI (PE) and phase-encoding formatters, which were used by a myriad of original equipment manufacturers as I/O devices for their product lines.

In the 1970s, Pertec entered the computer industry through several acquisitions of computer producers and started manufacturing and marketing mostly minicomputers for data processing and pre-processing. This split up Pertec into two companies. Pertec Peripherals Corporation (PPC), which remained based in Chatsworth, California, and Pertec Computer Corporation (PCC), which was located at 17112 Armstrong Avenue, in Irvine, California.

Pertec bought MITS, the manufacturers of the MITS Altair computer, for US$6.5 million in 1976. This purchase was motivated mainly by the ownership of the Microsoft BASIC sources and general license that Pertec erroneously assumed to be included in the deal. They also acquired iCOM, makers of micro peripherals, in the same year. They believed that these acquisitions would change them from selling computers mostly for hobbyists, to selling them for small businesses.

Pertec changed their name, after the acquisition of MITS, from Pertec Corporation to Pertec Computer Corporation to "be more reflective of the company's present position and to clearly state our future direction".

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