[1] Van Alstyne had previously co-founded Wordplex, a manufacturer of word processing computer systems also based in Westlake Village, in 1974.
At Wordplex, Van Alstyne served as president; he and his team developed word processors that directly competed against IBM's offerings at the time.
[6] In 1980, Omnidata released their first word processing system, the Omni/1, which included two Shugart 5.25-inch floppy drives and a Qume daisy wheel printer.
[13] Now on their own, Omnidata began developing the Omni Convertible, an ambitious 16-bit microcomputer that featured support for multiple differing microprocessor architectures running simultaneously.
[15] Unveiled at the 1983 CES in November and released to the general public in January 1984,[14][16] the Omni Convertible came stock with one co-processor card containing Texas Instruments' TMS9995.
[15] While only up to three cards could be operated at the same time, this allowed users to run a combination of CP/M, Unix, MS-DOS, UCSD Pascal, Xenix,[17] Omni-DOS seamlessly and simultaneously.