Boca Research

Boca Research was a peripheral and graphics card manufacturer in the early days of the PC. Based out of Boca Raton, FL. and founded by Tim Farris in May 1986, they started out producing memory expansion cards for the original IBM PC. Farris had previously co-founded Quadram Corp., which he sold a year earlier.

Boca Research outsourced almost all the actual board manufacturing, while his team managed the R&D, testing, packaging, shipping, and selling.

In 1987 Boca Research branched out into the graphics card market, and in 1991 began selling networking products. Their modems in particular were very popular - in 1996 they were the fourth largest modem manufacturer in the US. The year before they moved to try to acquire Hayes Microcomputer Products for $75 million, but the deal collapsed.

The company pulled out of the PC market entirely by 1998, having seen external modems and network cards replaced with internal cards and 'soft modems' and their subsequent profits falling sharply. They then moved fully into software development as well as set-top boxes for television.

Boca's graphics cards are listed here:

ISA	VESA Local Bus
MEMEK (1987) EGA by BOCA (1987) Dual Graphics Adapter (1988) Multi-EGA by BOCA (1988) VGA by BOCA (1989) SuperVGA (1991) Vortek VRAM (1993)	SuperX VGA (1993) Vortek VL-VRAM (1993)

Their memory and I/O cards are listed here:

ISA	MCA
BOCARAM (1986) TopHat (1987?) BOCARAM/AT (1988) BOCARAM 30 (1988) BOCARAM/AT Plus (1989) BOCARAM 50/60 (1989)	BOCARAM MCA 50Z (1989)