History (1992): DEC (81%) and StorageTek (19%) in MR Head Joint Venture

Digital Equipment Corp. (Maynard, MA) will increase its thin-film head production, taking over a large part of the head facilities owned by Storage Technoloqy Corp. in Colorado. This is the result of a joint agreement between the two companies.

The new firm’s name will be Rocky Mountain Magnetics Inc. (RMM), owned at 81% by DEC and 19% by StorageTek.

Frank Shelledy will be GM of RMM which will lease a 74,000 square foot plant with 250 employees. Shelledy was previously’ director of tape and disk head operations at StorageTek.

It will benefit from a $50 million investment from DEC and $10 million from STK and will continue developing magneto-resistive head.

Sunward Technologies (San Diego, CA), a manufacturer of disk heads, partly-owned by Conner Peripherals (San Jose, CA), was also interested in acquiring this business but DEC got the last word.

StorageTek has been producing its own heads for its 14-inch DASDs that it is beginning to drop for its Iceberg offer.

DEC will now have access to MR technology for its own HDDs and will be able to increase its production of disk heads, as their volume manufactured in its own plant in Shrewsbury, MA was not sufficient.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠56, published on September 1992.