Priam Corporation

~ the eulogy ~

William Schroeder and Al Wilson left Memorex and started Priam in San Jose in 1978, which was a good year to start a disk drive company and a terrible decade to be running one. The first products were fourteen-inch Winchester drives with high capacity for the time, sold to the people who bought minicomputers and high-end workstations. Priam moved to eight-inch drives in 1980, and its products ended up under Commodore CBM machines and IBM PCs, in systems running NetWare or Unix or Pick.

The problem arrived as a form factor. The market that grew fastest through the mid-1980s wanted 5.25-inch drives, and Priam's own development program for one was late and going nowhere. In 1985 the company dropped it and merged with Vertex Peripherals, buying a position in a market it had failed to build into. That is the year the losses start and they do not stop.

The numbers tell it without commentary. Fiscal 1987 closed with a $41.3 million net loss, and fiscal 1988 looked like a recovery at $142 million in sales with net income of half a million, which is a rounding error dressed as good news. Fiscal 1989 came in at $122.7 million of sales against a $25.4 million loss. Headcount fell from a thousand to eight hundred and eventually to three hundred and eighty, with two hundred going in a single announcement. Chapter 11 was filed in october 1989.

Nothing here reached a household and nothing here reached me. By the time I was buying my own disks in Turkey in the late nineties the surviving names on the label were Seagate and Quantum, and Priam had been gone for most of a decade before I knew what a hard drive was. What I recognize from a distance is the shape of the failure, because it is the one that keeps happening to component companies. The interface outlives the manufacturer. A Priam drive of 1986 speaks a protocol that other people's drives went on speaking for years after the company that shipped it stopped existing, and the standard is what survives, never the firm.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it made ~

A Winchester drive in 1978 was a sealed assembly with the heads flying over the platters inside it, which had only been a commercial product for five years, and building one at fourteen inches for the minicomputer market meant selling to system builders rather than to people. Nobody who used a Priam drive knew they were using a Priam drive. It sat inside a cabinet in a machine room with a fan noise and a capacity number in the documentation.

The late pivots were the right ideas at the wrong time. Priam went at optical WORM disks and at drives packaged for Novell networks, both of which turned into real markets for other companies. Neither arrived early enough to matter for a firm that was losing twenty-five million dollars a year against sales that had started falling.

~ the unraveling ~

What happened after october 1989 is the interesting part, because Priam was not shut down so much as disassembled by buyers who each wanted one thing. Sequel took the high-end drives, the fourteen-inch and ten-inch lines with some 5.25-inch product alongside them, while Atasi bought what was left of the 5.25-inch business. The 3.5-inch Shrike drive went on its own to a firm belonging to Michael Warner. Private investors then restarted the name as Priam Systems Corp in 1990 with fifteen employees, out of manufacturing entirely and into subsystems, and sold the drive business on to Prima International of Santa Clara in 1991.

A thousand people made drives in San Jose and twelve years later fifteen people owned the name. The founders and the manufacturing were both gone, and the service contracts were being honored by a company that had bought them at auction. That is a more common ending in this industry than the bankruptcies anybody writes about, and it leaves nothing behind to visit.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »