Plus Development Corporation

~ the eulogy ~

The problem the HardCard solved has completely stopped existing, which is why it needs explaining. An IBM PC or XT had two half-height bays at the front, and a lot of them left the factory with both occupied by floppy drives. If you then wanted a hard disk you were looking at a case to open, a power supply to worry about, a bay you did not have, and a controller card anyway. Plus Development's answer was to stop asking for the bay. Put the disk on the controller card, slide the whole thing into an expansion slot, and the machine has a hard drive without anything visibly changing.

Quantum, which until then sold drives to computer manufacturers, incorporated Plus Development in November 1983 to sell to end users instead. Its own description from 1985 puts it plainly: a majority-owned subsidiary set up "to design and market PC enhancement products to end users", selling through retail outlets and through the distributors and resellers behind them. Wikipedia dates the founding a month earlier and says the company was incorporated first as BBH Corporation and then as Qew Corporation before settling on the name, and credits the original idea to a dinner conversation between Nolan Bushnell and Quantum's president.

The hard part was thickness. A standard 3.5-inch drive of the period stood 1.6 inches tall and an ISA slot does not give you that, so Plus had the mechanism built to one inch specifically to fit, with production contracted to Matsushita Kotobuki Electronics in Shikoku. Competitors who skipped that step and used an off-the-shelf drive shipped cards that overhung into the neighboring slot, so the machine lost two slots to gain one disk. The finished card measured about one inch by 4.2 by 13.4, held 10 MB formatted, and went on sale in October 1985 at a list price of $1,095. Reportedly $15 million went into developing it.

~ the dossier ~

~ twenty eight imitations ~

By June 1986, eight months after launch, twenty-eight companies were selling something similar. Plus had registered the Hardcard trademark by 1988 and had to go after Mountain Computer for using the name, settling out of court that year. The name had gone generic by then, the way walkman had: a hardcard was any disk on a card, whoever made it.

The line kept going for a while. HardCard 20 in June 1986, HardCard 40 in May 1987, the HardCard II at 40 and 80 MB in January 1990, the HardCard II XL at 50 and 105 MB that October. Plus also bought LaCie in December 1990 and sold a removable-cartridge drive called the Passport. By the time the HardCard EZ arrived in September 1992 at capacities up to 240 MB, the cards were being sold under the Quantum name, because the company whose name had been on all the previous ones no longer existed.

~ folded back in ~

Nothing failed, and nobody issued the kind of statement that gets remembered. On 20 August 1991 the trade press reported that Quantum was restructuring, and that Plus Development, described as its wholly owned subsidiary and industrial distribution company, was to be merged into a $300 million business unit called Quantum Commercial Products aimed at the distribution channel. Jeff Heimbuck, then president of Plus, would stay on running the new unit and report to Quantum's vice-chairman. LaCie would carry on as a Quantum subsidiary regardless. The merger, the report said, "will be effective in October".

That is a prospective sentence and nobody appears to have published a completed one, so October 1991 is the honest date and the day is not recoverable. Wikipedia's infobox says 1993 instead, with nothing behind it; the dated trade report and the Quantum-branded HardCard EZ of September 1992 both argue against that. Quantum was a far larger company by 1991 than it had been in 1983, and the subsidiary it had set up to reach consumers had turned into one of its sales channels.

What really retired the HardCard was the PC getting roomier and IDE drives getting cheap, though I have not found a source that says so in as many words, so treat that as the obvious reading rather than a documented one. The thing worth keeping is the shape of the idea: for about six years the simplest way to upgrade a computer was to put the upgrade on a card, because the card slot was the only space the machine was willing to give you. On the machine I eventually owned that had inverted completely: bays going spare, and the slot the scarce thing, taken up by a sound card and a modem.

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