Rodime

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

~ the last words ~

Glenrothes is a new town in Fife, built after the war, and by the eighties it was part of what the Scottish press liked to call Silicon Glen. Rodime was founded there in 1979 by a group of former Burroughs people, some Scottish and some American, to build hard disks. In 1983 it shipped the RO351 and the RO352, the first hard drives made to the footprint of a 3.5 inch floppy drive, at five and ten megabytes.

The form factor is the whole story. A drive that fits a floppy bay can go in a desktop machine without redesigning the case, and once a couple of manufacturers agreed on it, the entire industry moved. Apple used Rodime drives in the Hard Disk 20, the first external hard disk it sold for the Macintosh, which plugged into the floppy port because the machine had nothing better to offer. That was as close to the mainstream as the company got.

Being first bought Rodime almost nothing. It listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1986 and was already unprofitable, having stopped making money after 1985, squeezed by American competitors with more capacity and hurt by its own late products. A financial restructuring in 1989 held it up for two more years. Manufacturing stopped in 1991 and the workforce of about 620 was cut roughly in half across the Scottish and Florida operations.

I have opened a lot of desktop machines since, and every one of them had a bay sized for this company's idea in it. The name was on none of them. That is the ordinary fate of a component standard: the shape gets adopted by everybody and the firm that cut it first goes under before anyone outside procurement learns to spell it. Rodime is a Scottish word to me only because I went looking for who did it.

~ the record ~

~ the patent years ~

What was left after 1991 was a holding company with two American patents, 4,568,988 and 4,638,383, and lawyers. Rodime sued much of the disk drive industry for infringement and collected real settlements from several of them, which for most of the nineties was the only revenue the business had. It is worth saying plainly that the popular version, in which Rodime patented the 3.5 inch form factor itself, is not true. The patents covered particular drive implementations.

The courts eventually found both patents invalid. The 1997 decision against Seagate was reversed on appeal, and Seagate settled in 2000 rather than go back to trial. The company that had invented a form factor spent nine years arguing about what it was owed for it, and the argument outlasted the products by almost a decade.

~ what it became ~

In 2000 Rodime PLC did a reverse takeover of the Littlewoods gaming business and changed its principal activity to betting. Soon after, it renamed itself Sportech. The stock market listing that had been created to fund Scottish disk drive manufacturing became a football pools operator, and the disk drive part of the name went with the name.

There is a whole class of company that ends this way, where the trading shell is worth more than anything the shell ever built. Rodime's engineers made the object that every desktop computer for a generation was designed around. The corporate entity's most profitable decade was the one after it stopped making anything, and its final act was to become somebody else entirely.

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