LaPine Technology

» see lapine.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The assets went under the hammer in late 1987, and most of them were broken. Computergram reported the sale on 2 December: the majority shareholder, Prudential Bache Trade Corp, had auctioned off what LaPine Technology still owned, which turned out to be mainly Winchester drives that customers had returned for repair, along with the test and office equipment. The company had been formed about four years earlier to pioneer the 3.5-inch disk drive. The form factor went on to win completely.

Anthony LaPine had spent his career in storage before he put his name on a company. By the account he later wrote for the Computer History Museum, he worked on IBM's advanced technology team and holds a patent on data synchronization from that period. He helped start the Memorex Equipment Group in 1969 and ran its disk drive division, and by 1981 he was president of Irwin-Olivetti. The corporation carrying his name was formed in 1984 on the account the Ninth Circuit later used, though that same self-written biography puts it a year earlier.

The ownership was the problem, and it was there from the start. LaPine Technology sat under a vehicle called LaPine Holding Co, in which Prudential-Bache held sixty seven percent and Kyocera held the rest. Kyocera had contracted in 1984 to manufacture the 3.5-inch drives, and Prudential-Bache financed and managed the business. So the company designed a drive it did not build and sold it on money it did not control, which left both halves of its existence in the hands of parties who answered to themselves.

It came apart over the winter of 1986. Two agreements signed in 1985 governed the relationship, one for trading and one licensing LaPine's technology to Kyocera for manufacture. A reorganization was agreed in principle that October and made definitive in November. On 22 December 1986 Kyocera said it would not execute the amended trading agreement or the financing that went with it. The arbitrators who heard the case years later put the death in plain words: LaPine's business ceased and it failed because of Kyocera's actions during the first half of 1987.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what the titan was ~

One product line is documented in any detail, and the datasheet for it survives. The Titan 20, model LT200, held twenty formatted megabytes on two disks under four heads. It spun at 3,600 rpm and spoke the ST412/506 interface at five megabits per second, with six hundred and twelve data cylinders active and four held spare. It weighed two pounds and measured 1.63 by 4.00 by 5.75 inches. The sheet claims 28,000 hours mean time between failures and five years of service life with no preventive maintenance required. The print code at the bottom reads 8602, which dates it to February 1986, above a copyright line for LaPine Technology Corporation and an address at 182 Topaz Street, Milpitas.

The selling points were mechanical. LaPine advertised the only drive with a patented head-lifter, which held the heads off the disk surfaces entirely so that the thing was, in the brochure's phrase, truly stiction free. The other claim was a box-within-a-box design that shock mounted the head and disk assembly inside the drive on a four-point suspension, so a 20 megabyte disk could survive being treated badly. The cover line sold ruggedness rather than capacity, calling it the ruggedized 3.5-inch Winchester disk drive that works where it's needed.

~ the sixteen year lawsuit ~

By the summer of 1987 LaPine was no longer a manufacturer and sued anyway. Operating, in Computergram's description, as a shell company, it filed a $60m claim alleging that Kyocera had altered shipping and pricing schedules to push it out of business and take its Winchester technology outright. Kyocera meanwhile had stood up a Memory Products division to sell drives built on that technology, offering 20Mb and 35Mb units with a 40Mb in development. Five of LaPine's senior managers left to start a new company, Comport, a few miles away in Milpitas.

The case went to arbitration in Paris and stayed there for years. Kyocera's own annual report to the SEC supplies the date the rest of the record blurs: on 1 September 1994 the International Chamber of Commerce issued its award, ordering Kyocera to pay LaPine and Prudential-Bache Trade Corp approximately $257 million including interest, arbitration costs and fees. Kyocera moved to vacate the award in California's northern federal district, relying on a clause in which the parties had agreed in advance to broad judicial examination of arbitration awards. That clause turned a contract fight into a question of federal procedure.

Sitting en banc on 29 August 2003, the Ninth Circuit held that private parties cannot contractually impose their own standards of review on the federal courts. Kyocera appealed on toward the Supreme Court and then stopped. On 22 December 2003 it reached agreement with the Prudential entities and the two LaPine companies to settle every claim between them, and it has paid $331.5 million under that settlement, booked in its accounts as a cash payment of 35,454 million yen. LaPine Technology had been shut for sixteen years by then.

~ what the form factor won ~

I was three years old during the auction. What I have in place of a memory is the shape of every desktop machine I have opened since. The drive bay is 3.5 inches across because an argument about form factors got settled during the 1980s, and LaPine was on the winning side of it. The company was wound up in 1987 regardless.

The distance between being right and surviving is the part of this an engineer keeps running into. LaPine picked the correct form factor years ahead of the market and then handed the building of it to the one party best positioned to take it away. Being early is a bet on other people's behavior as much as your own.

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