Originally Posted by Trakhak

Not sure what you meant by "Grant Peterson [sic] came up with that stem." As far as I remember, he had nothing to do with the Allsop Softride stem. Never equipped any Bridgestone or Rivendell bikes with it, never listed it in any catalog.

Quick search result:

---The Softride suspension bicycle stem, often associated with the Softride "beam" bikes, was developed by James Allsop and David Calopp in the late 1980s. Introduced around 1989-1990, the stem was designed to provide front-end suspension for mountain bikes and, later, road/triathlon bikes by using a parallelogram design with a viscoelastic damping element.---

I used one on a hybrid that I cobbled together in the early '90s and rode on fire roads. I agree that it worked, if anything, better than the early suspension forks.

Members of the small MTB team sponsored by Softride and Ritchey won a couple of world championships and at least one world cup using the stems, racing against big fields of riders on bikes with suspension forks.