History (1989): Priam Under Chapter XI

HDD manufacturers are still moving high and low.

Miniscribe is not far from Chapter 11.

Priam Corp. (San Jose, CA), founded in 1978, has just jumped too and laid off 200 people, 35% of its workforce which now counts 380 persons, compared with 800 three or four months ago.

Priam lost $25.4 million on sales of $122.7 million in the fiscal year ended July 1.

Richard Reiser, founder and engineering VP, and Michael Kellicutt, product quality VP, left the company.

Among all the possible reasons of these financial problems, the first one is probably the delay in announcing some new products and particularly a 5.25-inch 760MB HDD.

Priam could possibly close its Taiwanese plant concentrated on 5.25-inch HDDs.

To come out of chapter 11, Priam is putting all its efforts in a new 3.5-inch 400MB HDD, called Shrike, developed jointly with Matsushita of Japan.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠23, published on December 1989.

Note: The company declared bankruptcy in 1989. It was re-established with the help of external investors as Priam Systems Corp. in 1990, led by Wil Cochran as president and Reiser as VP. Finally, the disk drive business was sold to Prima International of Santa Clara, CA, a computer peripherals VAR, in 1991. Service was provided by Sequel.