Computer Memories, Inc.

~ the goodbye ~

In August 1984 a small Los Angeles drive maker won the contract that every storage company in California wanted. The base model of the IBM PC/AT shipped with a 20 megabyte hard disk, and for the length of that contract every one of those disks came from Computer Memories, Inc. of Chatsworth. It was the kind of win that normally makes a company, and this one was out of the drive business within two years of signing it.

Raymond Brooke and Abraham Brand founded it in 1979 with several colleagues out of Pertec Computer Corporation, and incorporated it on 6 August of that year. The early catalog was three 5¼-inch drives holding somewhere between five and fifteen megabytes unformatted, built around stepper motors and designed to be cheap. Intel was an early investor. The company went public on 23 August 1983 with roughly two million shares, a year before IBM called.

The unwinding ran fast. By January 1985 the company had taken a six million dollar emergency loan from a lender it would not name, which the New York Times thought was probably IBM itself. In June 1985 the Los Angeles Times reported that Brand, by then forty nine and six years into the company he had started, had been replaced as president by a man named Streuter. In late 1985 IBM said it would stop buying CMI drives once the contract expired that December, and Quantum sued over the servo in the CM6600 line.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the pulley ~

The lawsuit is where the engineering shows. Quantum's design put the tracking grating on the head arm and drove the arm straight off a voice coil. CMI, which knew how to build stepper drives cheaply, made a composite motor that bolted into the space where the stepper went, voice coil underneath and tracking mechanism on top, and then connected it to the arm through the same metal-band pulley it had always used. That left the feedback sensor behind the belt rather than ahead of it, so the servo had to correct for slack it could not see, and the firmware did not allow for it.

~ what ibm said ~

During 1985 the failures became public. The Singapore-built CM6000 drives were coming back badly enough that dealers were quoting failure rates in the tens of percent, and PC Magazine opened a feature on 29 April 1986 with a sentence that has outlived everything else written about the company: if you own an IBM PC AT and your hard disk hasn't crashed yet, don't worry, it probably will. The same article put a direct question to IBM about what share of AT drives had failed. IBM answered that it considered the information confidential, and then said that an overwhelming percentage of AT owners told surveys they were satisfied.

CMI shipped a redesigned 7600 series in 1986, built to avoid the patent it had been sued over, and it made no difference. The reputation was the product by then. On 2 July 1986 the company announced that it was leaving hard disk production and marketing altogether, about ninety five percent of its business, and the New York Times gave the news a three-word headline: Disk Drives Dropped.

~ the part an engineer reads twice ~

I was two years old in Chatsworth's bad summer and this whole story reached me as documents, decades later. What makes it worth reading anyway is that the failure is legible. Most dead companies leave you a balance sheet and a press release. This one leaves a specific mechanical decision, a belt sitting between the sensor and the thing being sensed, with firmware that assumed a rigidity the hardware did not have.

That is a familiar shape to anyone who has shipped a control loop. The sensor reports where the sensor is, never where the load is, and the distance between those two readings is where the product fails. CMI got caught making it in the one year when its only customer of consequence was IBM, shipping the AT.

~ the kava years ~

What happened to the corpse is the strange part. Through 1987 the remainder was shopped to buyers with no connection to storage at all: the movie producer Hemdale Film Corporation, which Variety reported in March 1987 was being taken over by the computer firm with a twenty nine million dollar infusion, and then the cartoon house DIC Animation City. Both deals fell apart. In 1988 Paul and Natalie Koether of Far Hills, New Jersey bought the still-listed shell and used it as an investment vehicle. It was renamed American Holdings in 1992 and Pure World in 1995, after its largest subsidiary, which supplied kava and other botanical extracts. On 6 June 2005 the French extract maker Naturex bought it.

Wikipedia therefore files the company as defunct in 2005, and that is defensible for the legal entity. This grave does not follow it. The thing called Computer Memories stopped on 2 July 1986; what traded for another nineteen years was a stock listing with other people's businesses inside it, and by 1992 it did not even carry the name.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »