How it started
History
The company was founded in 1976 as Expandor Inc. by Eugene Yost and Richard Raub on Beatty Road in Monroeville, Pennsylvania. They soon moved to 1121 Sainte Claire Plaza, suite 300 in Upper Saint Claire Pennsylvania. The first Engineer was Tom McElroy, hired on Thanksgiving Day in 1978. In 1982, the company changed its name to Black Box Corporation and released its well-known Black Box Catalog.
Following a temporary dip in operations during Black Monday of 1987, Odyssey Partners bought the company through a leveraged buyout in 1988. In 1989, one of its divisions, “Interlan,” was sold to Racal.
1990s
After suffering losses from debt servicing, Black Box Corporation underwent a restructuring in 1990. Its telecom product business was divided into a subsidiary called Micom Communications Corporation. Under the name MB Communications, an initial public offering was registered at NASDAQ in December 1992. Micom Communications unit was spun off and acquired by Northern Telecom (Nortel) in June 1996. Micom had money troubles and did some kind of share buy back in 1988. All the other companies were gone and BB was left. BB was then considered the parent company of Micom.
In May 1997, Black Box Corporation’s board of directors authorized management to buy back the company's stock, depending on market prices and other factors. In 1998, the company started offering on-site data and infrastructure services in the United Kingdom that further expanded throughout Europe and the Pacific Rim.
From Wikipedia’s article on Black Box Corporation, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3