The Rise And Fall Of Blockbuster

‎Newsweek:

Before Blockbuster became a video store behemoth—and, now, a firm that has filed for bankruptcy—it was, in fact, an oil company.

That’s right—if Blockbuster were a movie, the opening scene of The Blockbuster Story would be set 25 years ago in the Dallas offices of an oil-equipment provider called Cooks Data Services.

Cooks Data, a supplier of tools and computer software to the Texas oil and gas industry, had been founded in 1978 by a man named David Cook. Cook—who Fortune Small Business once called the video world’s Pete Best—was an entrepreneur with a penchant for building databases. After the collapse of the oil market in the mid-eighties, Cook, at the urging of his wife, decided to try his luck in the video rental market. He opened the first Blockbuster store in Dallas in October of 1985. Read on.