Nomaï

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

~ the last words ~

Nomaï made the disks, not the drives. That is the whole business and also the whole legal problem. A company in Avranches, in Normandy, registered on 1 February 1992, it built removable cartridges that worked in hardware other people had designed and sold, and it sold them for less. It did this first against SyQuest and then against Iomega, whose Zip drive was the format of the late 1990s office.

Revenue was 70 million francs by 1994 and the company was listed on the Paris Bourse under NOMF. EMTEC and Verbatim among others put their own names on Nomaï-manufactured media and sold it through their own channels, which is the quiet part of the removable storage business and the part with the volume in it. There was a design office in Scotland and a sales office in the United States, and after the acquisition of RPS Media, a 60,000 square foot disk plant at Albi.

The lawsuits started in 1993 with SyQuest, over cartridges that fit the 44MB and 88MB drives. That one settled quickly and without much blood, and then both companies had trouble anyway. Iomega was different. Iomega sued in 1997 over the XHD 100, won a Paris injunction on the grounds that the cartridge looked too much like a Zip disk, and then filed a further run of suits through the second half of that year, in France and Germany as well as in the United States.

~ the record ~

~ the shape of the cartridge ~

The first Paris injunction was about appearance rather than function, and it expired in September 1997. Nomaï's answer was to buy the Albi plant and raise production. This is a company that responded to being enjoined by making more of the thing. The remaining suits ran on until July 1998, when they were settled the way these things usually are: Iomega bought a majority of Nomaï's stock along with the specific technology behind the XHD and DUO media.

I have never owned a Zip drive or a clone of one. By the time I needed to move a hundred megabytes from one machine to another the answer was a CD-R, and then a USB stick, so this whole fight over the shape of a plastic shell had already been had in courtrooms I would not read about for most of thirty years.

~ bought to be stopped ~

StorageNewsletter's write-up at the time is blunt about it. The forty five million dollars went out, it says, with the goal of eliminating a rival more than of obtaining assets. Iomega did announce that Clik! media for the European market would be made in the former Nomaï plant, put five million dollars into the project and produced half a million diskettes there. Then the demand for Clik! turned out not to exist and the manufacturing went back to Roy, Utah.

So production in Avranches stopped and every person in it was let go, in the order these things happen: official press releases still in the conditional tense while the decision was already made. One hundred and forty jobs went, a hundred and ten of them in France. The Scottish subsidiary, which had been a company called Myrica before Nomaï bought it, had already been shut the previous summer. The best line in the whole piece is the last one, and it is reporting rather than rhetoric: phone calls are not returned at the Paris sales office.

~ what fit what ~

The compatible-media business was a real industry for about a decade and it has no modern equivalent, because the thing it depended on stopped existing. A drive maker sold you hardware at thin margin and then sold you cartridges forever at a fat one, and that second revenue stream was the whole model. A third party selling compatible cartridges took money straight off that second stream, which is why the response to one was lawyers rather than price cuts. When flash memory arrived there was no cartridge left to clone.

~ the slow paperwork ~

Wikipedia says Iomega closed the Avranches factory in 1999 and stops there. The French register keeps going, and what it records is how long a dead company stays technically alive. SIREN 384 656 385 has three establishments. The first is Avranches from 1 February 1992 to 21 November 1992. The second is Avranches again, from that date until 1 September 2000. Then the registered seat moves to 3 rue du Colonel Moll in the 17th arrondissement of Paris, where it sits from 1 September 2000 until 3 September 2002. The company itself is marked closed on 20 August 2006, fourteen and a half years after it opened and seven after it last made anything.

nomai.com serves a parking stub today and nomai.fr answers with a suspended-account notice from its host. The dated ending is a line item in a government database, which is where it has been sitting since August 2006.

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