Black Box Corporation, also doing business as Black Box Network Services, is headquartered in the Pittsburgh suburb of Lawrence, Pennsylvania, United States. The company is a provider of communications products.

The company has a long history. In the 1970s it was called the Expandor division of Micom Systems, and offered printer switches popularly called "black boxes". It published a popular "Black Box Catalog". Another division, Interlan, sold local area network equipment. After a slow-down in business in the mid-1980s and Black Monday of 1987, Odyssey Partners acquired the company in 1988, through a leveraged buyout. A proposed sale was met with a lawsuit, although the Interlan division was sold to Racal in 1989. Micom was re-organized in 1990 after losses from the debt servicing. Despite getting $5.5 million in fees for the deal, Drexel Burnham Lambert filed for its own bankruptcy the same year. The no-action letter from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission in June 1990 has been used as a legal precedent for similar cases.

The profitable catalog sales business moved from Simi Valley in California to Lawrence, Pennsylvania and changed its name to Black Box Incorporated. The telecommunications product business was split out to a subsidiary called Micom Communications Corporation. An initial public offering was made in December 1992 to cover the debt used to finance the 1990 deal (after two previous failed attempts), under the name MB Communications. In 1994, Micom was spun off, and acquired by Nortel in June 1996.

https://www.blackbox.com