History (1996): ComByte Out of Business

ComByte Inc. (Fort Collins, CO) closed its doors on March 1, and has not yet found a taker.

According to an employee who prefers not to be named, there are 3 reasons behind this unhappy end: 1) the market moved too quickly for ComByte to be competitive, 2) the company didn’t get enough volume production to lower the price of its products, 3) no big OEMs were found.

The company was found in June 1993 by Ed Harper and other senior managers of Colorado Memory Systems, shortly after the latter was acquired by Hewlett-Packard.

The original concept of its founders was to design and produce a combo drive that contained minicartridge as well as a floppy disk drive in a 3.5-inch half-height package.

In general, it is worth noting that combo units, no matter what kind, have not enjoyed much success in the storage industry (e.g. PC Card + floppy, CD-ROM + HDD, tape drive + HDD, etc.).

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue 99, published on April 1996.