PrairieTek

~ the obit ~

Terry Johnson had already done this once. He founded MiniScribe in Longmont, Colorado in 1980 and took it public. He was out of it well before the accounting fraud that made its name famous. In 1986 he incorporated a second drive company in the same town, aimed at building the smallest drive anybody had.

PrairieTek built 2.5 inch hard drives when the smallest thing anybody else sold was 3.5. The Prairie 220 was the first 2.5 inch drive on the market, 20 megabytes in a package about 30 percent the volume of a 3.5 inch unit, and the Prairie 120 got 21.4 megabytes onto a single platter in a case 0.6 inches thick. Sharp signed as the first major customer on 11 April 1990 and put the drive in its PC-6220 laptop. Alps Electric took roughly 10 percent of the company and brought its metal-in-gap head technology along with the money.

The financing never matched the ambition. Total capitalization across two rounds came to about $14 million, with Sequoia and Institutional Venture Partners in the second one, and by April 1990 the company had shipped 20,000 drives with around 200 people on the payroll. It became profitable in September 1990. Layoffs started five months later and production stopped in June 1991. The Chapter 11 filing was made that September.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ two and a half inches ~

Every laptop I have ever owned had a drive in it that traced back to this form factor, and for about fifteen years the shape of portable computing was determined by what would fit in a 2.5 inch bay. The dimension outlived the company that established it by roughly thirty years, and it only stopped mattering when flash storage made the whole question of a spinning platter's diameter irrelevant.

Dataquest was forecasting 570,000 units in the 2.5 inch market for 1990 and 2.45 million for 1991. The forecast was about right. PrairieTek died in the year the second number came true. That is how a first mover fails in hardware: the market it proved shows up on schedule and goes to whoever has the bigger factory.

~ the head that lifted off ~

The engineering problem with small drives in 1988 was stiction. Heads parked on the disk surface in a normal drive, and as platters got smoother and heads got lighter, the two surfaces would bond hard enough that the motor could not break them apart on startup. A laptop drive that will not spin up is a dead laptop.

PrairieTek solved it by lifting the heads off the disk entirely and parking them on a ramp, using the reverse EMF from the spinning motor to power the movement as the drive shut down. That is US patent 4,933,785 and it is the reason the patent portfolio was worth more than the company. Dynamic load and unload is how essentially every laptop drive built since has worked.

~ eighteen million dollars of paper ~

The bidding for what PrairieTek left behind went to $18 million in 1992, split between Conner Peripherals and Alps Electric, against total lifetime funding of $14 million. The investors got their money back from the intellectual property of a company whose products had lost.

The engineers had already scattered. Steve Volk and a group from the core team left after the profitable quarter to start Intégral Peripherals, chasing 1.8 inch drives, which turned out to be one form factor too far. Conner, which had taken the 2.5 inch market away from PrairieTek by simply being able to build more of them, was itself absorbed by Seagate in 1996.

PrairieTek traded for five years and shipped one genuinely new thing. The patent on it was still being worked around by drive engineers long after everyone who filed it had moved somewhere else.

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