In 1979 PCS was a dealer for the TRS-80 (Model I) RAM upgrade kits from Ithaca Audio.

Early 1982 they made a Z80 trainer kit, sold both as a DIY kit and pre-made.

At the end of 1982, the components of the IC 436 were sold as bargains. By then the business appear to be folding down.

In the "Canadian business reader 1986", Robert Patrick relates how the company was started. It is unclear from when the interview is exactly, probably from 1982.

From: Canadian business reader 1986 by Stephen Dewar
Source: https://archive.org/details/isbn_0773720790/page/50/mode/2up

It sounds like the plot for a CBC comedy: a little company headed
by a man with no formal training in electronics takes on big out-
fits like Tandy Corp.’s Radio Shack, Xerox Corp. and Wang
Canada Ltd. in the most competitive high-tech markets of
all—computers for homes and small businesses. Not only that,
the company is in Winnipeg, Man., a long way from Silicon
Valley South, North, East or anywhere. But Patrick Computer
Systems Inc. is readying itself to shoot for the moon, and some
serious investors are along for the ride.

At forty-three, Robert Patrick is an improbable CEO and
chairman of the board. He got his first electronics training in the
RCAF's telecommunications branch, then worked on analog
computers at Canadair Ltd. In 1967 he moved on to RCA Ltd.,
where he spent the next nine years in broadcasting, marketing
and development programs. By 1978, he was in Winnipeg run-
ning a small consulting firm, helping companies with marketing
problems and advising them about computers.

“This company was started out of desperation,” says Patrick
cheerily. ‘‘I’d had enough of working for others. I wanted to take
all the chances myself.”” He scented opportunity when he agreed
to do, at cost, a survey of small-business buying preferences for an
office supply company, provided he could use the data. The
survey showed that many small businesses were eager to com-
puterize, but most business computers were too expensive and the
computers with “business software" were inadequate.
eople simply expected more from them than they could do,” he says.

Patrick thought he could make a connection. An earlier con-
sulting job had introduced him to the world of electronics hobby-
ists, and he saw that the components for sale to hobbyists were
comparable in technology and qu: hhat he’d been selling at
RCA—at one-third to one-tenth the price. So he decided to try
using those low-cost, high-quality components as the building
blocks for computers: do-it-yourself high tech.

His first sale was to a Winnipeg businessman who bought a
system Patrick put together from existing components (with a little
help from his technical friends), The Shamrock, as he called it
(‘‘It went with my name,” he says), could handle only data pro-
cessing. He ultimately sold ten of them, but, he says, “‘the margin
was too small. So we built a new product that added word pro-
cessing epabilities and called it the Leprechaun, and thet evolved
into the selling now.

Patrick answer to the low throughput (the input and output
transactions of the computer) in minicomputers was simplicity
itself. He bought chips from the same manufacturers who sup-
plied the makers of minicomputers. Then he put more of them in,
combining them to give the iC 436 a surprisingly large throughput
capability and an ability to use more sophisticated software
packages. In fact, the iC436 isn’t simply a single computer: it has
a separate memory and microprocessor on every function. Thus it
can handle more information with more ease than most small
computers, “‘It’s like five Apples in terms of total processing
capacity,”” says Patrick. The whole works—keyboard, elec-
tronics, screen, printer, four-disk drive—fit into a neat desk-top
package, competitively priced at around $16,000, One fan, Ed
Hemmes, an electronics engineer who owns his own company in
Calgary, says, "Is a terrific piece of equipment, easy to use,
with a very sophisticated word processor system."

But bright ideas are one thing and building a company is
another. In 1979, Patrick gave his bank manager the happy news
that the federal governement agreed to back a loan for
$175,000. Under the impression that the bank would go along, he
even wrote a cheque against the loan. But the bank balked. ‘I
already owed them $20,000 and the deal called for them to be
responsible for only 10% of the loan. But they backed off, even
though I pointed out to them that they’d come out of it exposed
for only $17,500—less than they were already in for.”

Patrick couldn't afford to bounce a cheque. At lunch with a
former client, a local businessman, he looked so worried that the
man asked what the problem was. Patrick told him, and that
night he got a cheque for $10,000 against future goods and ser-
vices. No strings, no interest.

The money bought time for Patrick to find a more willing
banker. He also found engineers who solved the remaining design
problems in the prototype and figured out how to combine com-
ponents from competing manufacturers. Everybody on staff was a
novice at computer manufacturing. Patrick's son Roy, twenty-
two, took on the job of final assembly. His second son, Blair,
nineteen, actually assembled the first computer and is now the
leading field service man. “Blair can tear the computer apart and
have it back together again on your desk in no time," says Patrick
with pride. Bruce Maunders, an engineer from the University of
Manitoba with experience servicing word processors, is viee-
president of engineering. ‘‘He had the smarts,”” says Patrick,
“but he never had the chance before.’ Bob Sutherland, the presi-
dent and chief financial officer, was a bank manager. “He didn’t
know anything about computers,” says Patrick, ‘*but he knew
about banks.”

In 1980, a venture capital company assessed the value of the
five-man operation at an astonishing $10 million, taking into ac-
count the company’s marketing potential and the design of the
products. Patrick calls it ‘sweat equity’’: “What you've ac-
complished, even though not apparent in dollars and cents, is still
valuable.”” At that point, broker Rudy Schmichel of Canarim In-
vestment Corp. Ltd., a group of underwriters based in Winnipeg
and Vancouver, became interested. That October, Canarim took
the company public on the Vancouver Stock Exchange, where
adventurous investors have funded big dreams, dry holes and
bonanzas for decades. The $2-million offering sold out in four
hours at $2.30 a share. (Even in the depressed market of January
1982, the stock was trading in the $1.50-$2.00 range.)

With the money, Patrick hired seventeen more people and got
down to the hard job of setting up a plant capable of producing at
least a hundred computers a month. With no local pool of talent,
recruitment was slow and erratic, though Patrick says that the
company is now capable of full production and will begin to pro-
duce in that capacity as soon as the orders come in.

So far Patrick has built only about a hundred of the IC 436s. He
expects sales to jump this year to approximately $5 million from
less than $1 million last year, with another estimated increase in
1983 to $10 million. His marketing hasn’t fallen into place yet
though, and, he says, “‘there’s no point making more than we can
sell right now.’’ But his assembly operation has been performing
well on a Kit 80 computer training kit called the EZ-80. So far
they have shipped a thousand of the kits to China and have
another three hundred on back order. A new Super EZ-80, com-
parable to the Radio Shack TRS-80 and the Apple, is now going
into production to provide the Chinese with another five hundred
microcomputers.

“The big problems now are distribution, marketing and sup-
port, in that order,” says Patrick. But in addition to the Chinese
he has another big convert: Progressive Computer Assistance, a
Texas-based chain of business computer stores, whose president,
Don Brown, thinks he can sell twenty-five to a hundred a month,
He’s so enthusiastic that he’s building model office environments
in his new stores to showcase the product.

In fact, Patrick has already signed on dealers worldwide. Prob-
ably the toughest nut is—where else?—Canada, where dealers
are suspicious of computers made in Winnipeg. "Here, every-
body wants to know our entire pedigree and what right we have to
be in the business,” he says. With luck, hard work and a lot of
selling, Patrick may soon be able to answer that question for the
last time.