History (1991): Prima International Acquires Assets of Priam Systems

Prima International, Inc. (Santa Clara, CA), distributor of computers, subsystems, and peripherals and Priam Systems Corp. (San Jose, CA), a supplier of disk storage subsystems, have signed an agreement whereby Prima has acquired certain Priam Systems assets, among which is the full line of Priam name brand IBM compatible disk storage products.

The agreement also establishes a relationship for manufacturing and sales representation of the line.

Other terms of the agreement and purchase price were not disclosed.

The agreement will bring the Priam product line of HDD drives together with Prima’s Identica backup tape system product line, in a new Prima subsidiary.

It provides for Priam Systems to function under contract as Prima’s North American master manufacturer’s representative.

Under separate agreement, Priam Systems will build the product line for Prima. Prima has been distributor of several disk drive manufacturers: Conner Peripherals, Kalok, Micropolis, Priam Systems and SyQuest.

On its side, Priam Systems was already distributor of tape backup systems from Identica, a brand name and a product line acquired by Prima in 1989.

Priam Corp., an HDD manufacturer, started up in 1978, was placed under Chapter XI in October 1989. The company was sold in small parts to Atasi, Orca Technology, Sequel, WRC and finally to a group of private investors to form Priam Systems Corp., with Wil Cohran as president.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠41, published on June 1991.