Editing Stac Electronics (section)

===1983–1994===
The original founders included five [[Caltech]] graduate students in Computer Science (Gary Clow, Doug Whiting, John Tanner, Mike Schuster and [[Bill Dally|William Dally]]),<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.norway.org/PageFiles/451518/William%20Dally.pdf |title=From Science to Technology, From Research to Product| author=Dally, William |author-link=Bill Dally |publisher=[[Stanford University School of Engineering|Stanford Engineering]] | access-date=February 16, 2017}}</ref> two engineers from the industry (Scott Karns and Robert Monsour) and two board members from the industry (Robert Johnson of Southern California Ventures and Hugh Ness of [[Scientific Atlanta]]).  The first employee was Bruce Behymer, a Caltech undergraduate in Engineering and Applied Science.

Originally headquartered in [[Pasadena, California|Pasadena]], [[California]] and later in [[Carlsbad, California|Carlsbad]], [[California]], the company received venture capital funding to pursue a business plan as a fabless chip company selling application-specific standard products to the tape drive industry.  The plan was to include expansion into the disk drive market, which was much larger than the tape drive market. Following the success of [[Cirrus Logic|Cirrus]] in the disk drive market, this was the real basis for venture capitalists' interest in Stac.

As part of the application engineering to adapt its data compression chips for use in disk drives, the company implemented a [[DOS]] driver that transparently compressed data written to a PC hard disk and decompressed the data transparently upon subsequent hard disk reads.  In doing so, they discovered that given the relative speed difference between the PC processor and the disk drive access times, it was possible to perform the data compression in software, obviating the need for a data compression chip in every disk drive, as they were planning to produce.  This DOS driver was written in [[x86]] assembly language under contract by Paul Houle.

In 1990, the company released Stacker, a [[disk compression]] utility.  The product was highly successful, due to the relatively small capacities (20 to 80 megabytes) and high prices of contemporary hard drives, at a time when larger software packages such as Microsoft's new Windows user interface were becoming popular.  On average, Stacker doubled disk capacity, and usually increased disk performance by compressing the data before writing and after reading, compensating for the relative slowness of the drives.  Stac sold several million units of Stacker over the product's lifetime.

They also released a hardware product called ''STAC Coprocessor Card'', which claimed to not only improve the compression of the files, but to decrease the time needed to compress files. Salient Software would license Stac's acceleration technology for use in their [[NuBus]] ''DoubleUp'' and [[Processor Direct Slot|PDS]] ''Bullet'' cards for the [[Macintosh]], though they would use Salient's own [[DiskDoubler]] software.<ref>[https://tidbits.com/1991/01/21/double-stuff/ Double Stuff - TidBITS, 21 January 1991]</ref>