It is best remembered for its Manman enterprise resource planning (ERP) software[1] and for Sandra Kurtzig, the company's founder and one of the early female pioneers in the computer industry.
She left her job as a marketing specialist at General Electric and invested $2,000 of her savings to start the company in the apartment she shared with her HP salesman husband.
In 1978, Kurtzig came up with ASK's most significant product, named Manman (originally "MaMa"[4]), a contraction of manufacturing management.
Manman helped manufacturing companies plan materials purchases, production schedules, and other administrative functions on a scale that was previously possible only on large, costly mainframe computers.
After acquiring Software Dimensions, Kurtzig renamed it ASK Micro and launched an aggressive marketing program.
Of the company's failings in the emerging personal computer market, Kurtzig told BusinessWeek, "We have our fingerprints all over the murder weapon" that killed Software Dimensions.
Exacerbating the problem, Kurtzig and her family also began selling off large blocks of their stock holdings in the company, which triggered a shareholder lawsuit.
In its research and development activities, ASK began to focus nearly all of its resources on upgrading and improving existing products instead of creating new ones.
In the meantime, Kurtzig had spent her time traveling, writing her autobiography, and investing in other technology companies, but this proved to be unfulfilling.
In addition to this complementary expansion, Kurtzig began to revamp the way her old company had been run, shifting organization and priorities to new products.
Both Hewlett-Packard and EDS had strong histories of involvement with manufacturing businesses, and this heritage promised to open more potential markets for ASK.
Although this seemed like good news, ASK had mediocre results over the next several quarters, due to a lull in business while the company tried to bring new products to market.
In the early 1990s, ASK concentrated on the development and introduction of new products designed to provide communication between different computer systems and programs.
Although ASK appeared to be on solid footing to face the computer industry's challenging, competitive environment, its fortunes continued to decline.
Manman[2][8] was a family of Enterprise resource planning (ERP) marketed for Hewlett Packard HP-3000 and Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) minicomputers.
Seagate Technology's corporate headquarters and 4 disk drive production facilities required more user connections than the HP Systems would allow.
As a result of HP's system limitations, Seagate Technology was one of the first companies to take advantage of the Digital Equipment VAX platform.