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30 Nov 2023
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Maketeck is a company I started in 1992 using investors. I designed a series of industrial computer enclosures and we manufactured them in Euless, Texas.
In the '90s I had many ideas for products but couldn't fund all of them myself. One of the ideas was a line of air-tight computer enclosures made of metal for use in industrial environments named EnviroCase.
At that time I was building computers for a small pharmacy software company in Grapevine Texas as a sideline to my robotics business. I asked the owners if they would be interested in funding the idea and they agreed. There were 4 of us owners - Ed, Mack, Jeff, Roger. This is the only company I've ever had investors for and run as a formal corporation. It was an experiment to see if this would be a good way to implement ideas. They provided the funding and I designed the products, got production going, and managed the daily operations.
I designed the cabinets using a CAD program called SKETCH. This software is so old and outdated it wont even run on a modern computer.
I tested the prototype units in my backyard with sprinklers and a power washer. Initially the units were built in my shop along with the robotics products.
I've been asked if any of this was patent-able but that process is expensive and difficult for a small company and nobody had the stomach for it. It's likely the rotate-able front panel which accommodates either a desktop or tower computer could have been patented.
We distributed EnviroCases through dealers including PC Tools in California who also sold my robotics product line. This was just before the internet took off so sales were done the old-fashioned way using mail, telephones and fax machines. There were also some small ads taken out in trade journals but I haven't found them yet. When the internet came around in the mid-90s I built a website and we did sales that way.
Eventually Maketeck became big enough to have its own shop and we rented a space at Royal Park in Euless just a few doors down from my robotics company. There was 1 full time employee who built the orders and handled sales, then part-timers helped as needed.
Sales grew slowly but one of the customers ended up being the large printing company RR Donnelley. They use to buy 50 units at a time. There were several large orders like this and their goal was to outfit all of their production line computers with Envirocases. One day in 1999 they called and said they discovered their software was not Y2K compliant and had to redo their whole plan. That was a big hit but we kept going.
In 2000 we listed the business for sale with a broker and it was purchased by ITAC in Garland. I didn't keep track of what happened to Maketeck after that.
The product line was extremely simple. There was a small enclosure to hold a desktop computer and keyboard, an adjustable pedestal for it to stand on, and a stand-up version which had room for a printer below, and a slightly shorter sit-down version.
4-page brochure (PDF).
Price list 1999.
Dealer price list.
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Unlike my other ventures, this one required producing regular updates to shareholders. These original documents were written in Microsoft Publisher V1 and they can't be read by modern versions but I happen to have hard copies of a few.
Update #1.I designed Envirocases with individual metal panels so they could be shipped via UPS in normal cardboard boxes. Each panel was made of steel, welded, painted with a very good industrial paint, then gaskets were put on. The whole thing was bolt-together by the customer.
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We had a couple of dealers including PC Tools and possibly Circuit Specialities.
And we got on the front cover of PC Tools once but I can't find a copy.
Here's a page out of one of the PC Tools catalogs:
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