+Home     Museum     Advertising     News Archive     Articles     EMail  

Monroe Division of Litton Industries to Become Exclusive Distributor of Compucorp Calculators

Oxnard Press-Courier, Oxnard, California, August 8, 1974

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.