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Monroe Division of Litton Industries to Become Exclusive Distributor of Compucorp Calculators
This article announces an
agreement forged on August 2, 1974, stating that the Monroe
(Calculating Machines) division of Litton Industries shall become the sole
distributor of Compucorp calculators, now to be sold only under the Monroe
brand in the US & Canada, with the shutdown of all domestic marketing and
sales of Compucorp-branded calculators.
The result of this is that
most of Compucorp's sales and service personnel were to move into Monroe's
sales and service organization, performing essentially the same jobs they did
when working for Compucorp. Monroe's service organization would provide
on-going service for calculators previously sold under the Compucorp brand.
Computer Design Corporation, the design and manufacturing parent of
Compucorp, would continue to develop and manufacture electronic
calculating equipment, as it had been for Monroe for since the early
part of 1970, but would no longer sell any calculators and related items
under the Compcorp brand. Compcorp would be required to terminate all
OEM relationships that had been established, which included Sumlock
Comptometer(UK), Smith Corona/Marchant (SCM)(US), Deitzgen(US), Industria Macchine Elettroniche (IME)(Italy) and Seiko(Japan).
In compensation for this action, Litton placed an order with Compucorp for
$13M worth of calculators to be sold exclusively through Monroe's
sales network world-wide under the Monroe brand. Along with the large
order, Litton acquired approximately 24% of Compucorp's outstanding common
stock and provided $1.4M in equity funding (in addition to $1M provided a month
earlier). This funding would capitalize the expenditures necessary
to manufacture the calculators that Litton had ordred, as well as to pay
down certain debts that the Compucorp division of Computer Design Corporation
had incurred.
While Compucorp continued to exist as a business entity once this
deal was closed, all that remained was a tiny shell of what it had been.
A number of folks that were investigating other types of business
systems that Compucorp could potentially develop and market was all
that remained, essentially a research department. The
investigations of this group eventually lead to the development
of Word Processing equipment that used Computer Design Corporation's
advanced large-scale integration CPU chipset that served as the basis
for its advanced calculators, but with new microcode and expanded memory
to allow the chips become the brains of a capable word processing system.