SyQuest Technology

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

~ the obit ~

syquest's peak years overlap with my childhood. the sq400 44mb cartridge launched in 1986 and became the de facto standard for moving large files in the mac desktop-publishing world. the cartridge was a 5.25-inch flat disk in a hard plastic shell. the drive was a beige tower that sat on top of the mac next to the external scsi disk. by 1991 the sq800 doubled the capacity to 88mb. by 1994 the line was on every prepress bureau counter in north america (more or less).

iomega's zip drive arrived in 1995 with a 100mb 3.5-inch cartridge at a third of the price. honestly, syquest tried to answer with the ez135, the ezflyer 230, the syjet 1.5gb, and the sparq 1gb in rapid succession. none of them caught up. the company laid off half its staff in august 1998 and filed chapter 11 on 17 november 1998. iomega bought the us assets in january 1999 for around 9.1 million dollars, mostly to retire the brand.

by the time i was online in 1998, syquest was already filing for bankruptcy. the syquest cartridge belonged to the mac prepress era, and that was not a world ankara dial-up users touched. i learned the name much later, from threads about how prepress workflows used to move files between studios before email could carry a tiff.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the cartridge was for ~

before cd-r and before fat email attachments, the only way to hand a printer a 30mb quarkxpress file was on physical media. floppy disks topped out at 1.4mb. magneto-optical was expensive. the syquest cartridge sat in the middle of the price chart and the workflow chart at the same time, and the whole prepress industry standardized on it for almost a decade. ad agencies kept a small stack of empty syquest cartridges in the supply closet next to the toner.

~ how it lost ~

iomega zip was not actually faster or larger per dollar in 1995. it just looked cheaper at checkout. the zip drive was the consumer pitch and the syquest cartridge was the professional pitch, and as soon as the professional workflow had a cheaper way to move 100mb of artwork, the syquest tower became dead weight on the desk. by 1997 the same workflow had moved to cd-r anyway, which killed both formats inside two more years.

~ the next chapter ~

old syquest drives still surface on ebay every month, mostly bought by people trying to recover files off cartridges they found in a storage unit. the drive mechanisms were a known reliability issue at the end of the run, and recovery shops charge real money to read a sq800. the cartridge itself is a small object that turns out to have outlived almost every drive that could read it.

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