PIICEON, INC.

Piiceon incorporated in San Jose in August 1977 — a subsidiary of Dynatech Corporation, a Massachusetts-based conglomerate that spent the 1970s and '80s buying up small instrument, hardware, and communications makers. Piiceon's own later marketing would count from this year exactly: "Founded: Memory Manufacturing, 1977."

Four years in, the earliest product this record can find: the Superstore, a 128-kilobyte S-100/IEEE-696 memory board built for Alpha Microsystems' AM-100 and AM-100T business computers — machines that ran churches, party-supply stores, and 911 dispatch centers as much as they ran anything recognizably "tech." $2,000 in single quantities. 330-nanosecond access time. Address on the ad: 2350 Bering Drive, San Jose.

By the late '80s Piiceon had a Boston-based division, Helios Systems, building VME memory boards for Sun-3 workstations — a trade press notice from September 1989 described it plainly: "the Boston-based Helios Systems division of Dynatech Co's Piiceon Inc." 4, 8, and 12-megabyte boards, $3,000 to $7,000, built to slot straight into Sun's Eurocard VME system.

The same month, a COMPUTE! magazine buyer's guide put a street address to the PC side of the business for the first time: Piiceon, 1996 Lundy Avenue, San Jose — selling SUPERAM, a 4-megabyte board for Compaq 386 machines, $3,199. That name would outlive nearly everything else about the company: "SUPERAM Memory" was still the headline on piiceon.com's homepage in its final capture, seventeen years later, with no explanation of what it meant. Now there's one.

Two years on, an illustrated industry map titled Silicon Valley 1991 — the kind of promotional poster real estate firms and trade magazines handed out — put "Dynatech / Piiceon Helios" on the board, in the same company as Apple, Intel, and IBM. That December, a Washington law firm representing Wang Laboratories sent Piiceon a SIMM patent-infringement notice — a record that surfaces in a March 1993 letter the firm sent to the federal Base Closure and Realignment Commission, and that happens to be the earliest document naming Art Fonda as President, four years before the robberies made him a name in the local papers.

Sometime around 1995, ownership came back from Dynatech to Piiceon's own management — the company's last SEC-visible year as a Dynatech subsidiary, and the same year it starts showing up in the press strictly as its own thing: "Piiceon Corp," under CEO Art Fonda.

It showed up in the press because Silicon Valley's chip industry had a violent problem. Memory chips — small, untraceable, worth more by weight than most metals — had become the target of organized theft rings running through the Bay Area. Piiceon was robbed twice, both times at its 1996 Lundy Avenue, San Jose building. In one raid, vice president Jeff Anhorn was held at gunpoint and pistol-whipped before the robbers left with roughly $550,000 in memory chips and modems. Fonda and Anhorn started wearing panic buttons on neck lanyards, on-site and off.

The FBI's response, built by agent Richard Bernes, became Operation West Chips — an 18-month undercover investigation that culminated on February 28, 1996, when 500 federal and local officers staged coordinated dawn raids across six Bay Area cities. Forty-five convictions followed over the next four years; the last defendant, sentenced for the Piiceon robbery specifically, got nineteen years.

A smaller world than it looks — and closer to home than an industry coincidence: my father, Carl Chandler, worked at Piiceon itself from 1992 to 1995, two years of it alongside me, before he left for Smart Modular Technologies as Materials and Logistics Manager and, later, founded his own company. AllComponents, a sibling under the ACI Group roof Piiceon later joined, was in the same SIMM industry too. Not three threads that happened to brush against each other — one family, inside the building, on both sides of 1995.

Piiceon joined The ACI Group in 1998 — a Dallas-based, privately held roll-up of electronics manufacturing, OEM module, and channel-distribution businesses, backed by the venture firm Capital Southwest. Piiceon sat alongside sibling companies including Avant Technology and AllComponents, and the relationship went both ways: Piiceon supplied component logistics and supply-chain management back into the wider group.

The website itself didn't say so publicly until 2003 — five years of silence on its own homepage before the plain sentence finally appeared: "In 1998, Piiceon became a key component of The ACI Group."

A memory manufacturer's floor plan tells its own story — bigger buildings as the catalog grew from S-100 boards to full PC, workstation, CPU, and video-card lines; a last, smaller move in the company's final year.