Sisco - Sistemas e Computadores - Brazilian computer manufacturer of the market-reserve era, closed in 2001.

Sisco - Sistemas e Computadores S.A. built computers in Brazil during the years when doing so was national policy. It belonged to Grupo Maksoud, had units in several states, and its people stayed: former-employee records show tenures of twenty-nine to thirty-seven years.

It belongs beside Cobra, Scopus and Itautec on this timeline as one of the manufacturers the market reserve was built to make possible, and its ending is the same one that period produced repeatedly - the company closed around 2001, after the protection was gone and the imported machine was cheaper.

The detail worth keeping is what happened next. On 15 June 2001, as Sisco was winding down, five of its employees founded Ferje Informatica with the stated aim of not leaving Sisco’s clients unattended, drawing on knowledge the team had held since 1979. That is the honest shape of how these companies actually end: the corporate entity dissolves and the working knowledge walks out of the building and incorporates itself somewhere else.

Almost nothing of Sisco survives in a reachable public record - an advertisement from 1982, a court-records index, and the reviews of people who spent their careers there. That is not unusual for a manufacturer of this era, and it is worth stating rather than filling.

Sisco belonged to the MAKSOUD GROUP - the same holding that owned Hidroservice, then one of the largest engineering firms in Brazil, the news weekly Revista Visao, and the Maksoud Plaza hotel in Sao Paulo. A computer manufacturer sitting inside that particular conglomerate is worth noticing: the reserve protected national firms from foreign competition, and the capital that took up the protection was frequently capital that had made its money somewhere else entirely.

The company was building hardware and software for micro, mini and medium-sized machines, and was advertising under its own name by 1982. IT WOUND DOWN AROUND 2001: Ferje Informatica was founded on 15 June 2001 by five Sisco employees specifically so that Sisco customers would not be left unsupported, and describes its team's experience as acquired since 1979 - which places Sisco in operation by that year at the latest.

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