History (1990): End of HDD Maker Priam, Born in 1978

After being under Chapter XI protection in October 1989, Priam Corp. (San Jose, CA), HDD manufacturer started up in 1978, has been sold in small parts to Atasi, Sequel, Michael Warner and the remains to a few private investors.

In FY87, ending July 1, Priam had already reported a net loss of $41.3 million. In 1988 it came back to a balance with a $0.54 million net income and $142 million sales, up 10% from the former year. A small improvement before a big sink. FY89 was a disaster: only $122.69 million sales and a $25.42 million loss, a few months after that Glen Maddalon was named chairman and CEO to replace John Titsworth.

Priam opened a manufacturing facility in Taiwan in 1987 to move the production of 5.25-inch drives there.

The company’s staff dropped from 1,000 to 800, then to 570 last year and finally to 380.

Priam 72MB HDD

In 1989, Priam tried to get involved in the optical WORM disk business with a drive originated from LSI, not very performing, then in Novell-ready HDD drives. The expected product came too late: a high-capacity Winchester jointly developed with Matsushita Corp. Industrial (MCI). This 37321 3740 3.5-inch unit, also named Shrike, was discreetly displayed. It stored 320 and 400MB in ZBR mode.

Priam Corp. had subsidiaries in Taiwan, Epinay-sur-Seine (France), Reading (England) and Frankfurt (West Germany).

Little by little, the company was bought back. In April 89, Sequel Inc. (Santa Clara, CA) acquired the high-end storage assets of Priam Corp. in 14-inch, 10-inch and part of 5.25-inch disks. Sequel, formed a few month ago by some officials from the computer firm Unisys that took the decision to discontinue the development and manufacturing of drives, specialized in drive remanufacturing for mainframes.

That same month, Atasi (San Jose, CA) acquired the remaining 5.25-inch HDD activity of Priam. Then WRC, whose president is Michael Warner a former executive of Maxtor, bought the 3.5-inch Shrike drive. And finally, a group of private investors bought the rest to form a new company with 15 people named Priam Systems Corp., with Wil Cochran, a founder of Domain Technology, as president. It will no longer manufacture drives but will develop subsystems

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠29, published on June 1990.

Note: In 1985, Priam dropped their own 5.25-inch drive in-house development and merged with Vertex Peripherals, a company competing in same market.