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SyQuest Technology

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SyQuest 44 MB removable disk cartridge.
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SyQuest 44 MB removable disk cartridge.

SyQuest Technology, Inc., now known as SYQT, Inc., was an early entrant into the removable hard disk market for personal computers. The company was started in 1982 by Syed Iftikar who named it partially after himself in a derivation of "Sy's Quest". Its earliest products were 3.9" (100mm) removeable hard drives, and 3.9" (100mm) ruggedized hard drives for IBM XT compatibles and military applications. Some of their early fixed drives appear to be rebranded Seagate drives, especially if you compare the drive lists on [this data recovery site] with this [product table].

For many years SyQuest held the market, particularly as a method of transferring large desktop publisher documents to printers. SyQuest aim their products to give personal computer users "endless" hard drive space for data-intensive applications like desktop publishing, Internet information management, pre-press, multimedia, audio, video, digital photography, fast backup, data exchange, archiving, confidential data security and easy portability for the road.

In the years since 1995 they have not fared as well in the market, while Iomega cornered the Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) market. Over the period 1995 to 1997 sales declined resulting in a series of losses. In the first quarter of 1997 these losses had been reduced to $6.8 million with net revenues increasing to $48.3 million. This compares to a net loss of $33.8 million, or $2.98 per share, on net revenues of $78.7 million for the same period the year before.

Syquest filed for bankruptcy in late 1998, and portions of the company were subsequently purchased by Iomega Corp. in January, 1999. SYQT retained the rights to sell their products, allowing them to continue operations.

A significant reason for the losses was due to quality issues with the a series of products, amongst others the SparQ Drive, that caused a large portion of the drives to malfunction within just a few months of operation.

Syquest's product line included such devices as the following: (The 5.25" removable cartridge drives with 44MB, 88MB, and 200MB capacities were mostly used on Macintosh systems via the SCSI interface.)

External links

This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is [Foldoc licenselicensed] under the GFDL.

 

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