Priam Corporation was a company located in

San Jose, California San Jose, officially San José (; ; ), is a major city in the U.S. state of California that is the cultural, financial, and political center of Silicon Valley and largest city in Northern California by both population and area. With a 2020 popu ...

, founded in 1978 by William Schroeder and Al Wilson, two former

Memorex Memorex Corp. began as a computer tape producer and expanded to become both a consumer media supplier and a major IBM plug compatible peripheral supplier. It was broken up and ceased to exist after 1996 other than as a consumer electronics bran ...

executives, as a manufacturer of

hard disk drive A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magne ...

s. Originally, they made high-capacity 14-inch drives, developed for mainframe computers, available for minicomputers and high-end workstations, but switched to 8-inch disk drives in 1980. Their 8-inch hard disks could be found in a wide variety of add-on products like the huge Mator Shark box with

IEEE-488 IEEE 488 is a short-range digital communications 8-bit parallel multi-master interface bus specification developed by Hewlett-Packard as HP-IB (Hewlett-Packard Interface Bus). It subsequently became the subject of several standards, and is ...

interface for

Commodore PET The Commodore PET is a line of personal computers produced starting in 1977 by Commodore International. A single all-in-one case combines a MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor, Commodore BASIC in read-only memory, keyboard, monochrome monitor, ...

/CBM computers or the Priam DataTower series, external storage solutions, combining high-capacity hard disks and streamers in a single case, which could interface to various computers including IBM PCs. While Priam was considered a leader in certain technology segments at one time, they were late catching up in the transition to the 5.25-inch form factor and were ultimately one of the many hard drive manufacturers in the 1980s and 1990s that went out of business, merged, or closed their hard drive divisions; as a result of capacities and demand for products increased, and profits became hard to find. In 1985, Priam dropped their own 5.25-inch drive in-house development and merged with Vertex Peripherals, a company competing in the market for 5.25-inch drives. In the mid-1980s Priam's InnerSpace series offered fully integrated disk drive solutions to overcome disk capacity limitations imposed by

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few ope ...

prior to the release of version 3.31/4.0. This included custom hard disk controllers (based on

Western Digital Western Digital Corporation (WDC, commonly known as Western Digital or WD) is an American computer drive manufacturer and data storage company, headquartered in San Jose, California. It designs, manufactures and sells data technology produc ...

designs) as well as dedicated software for formatting (PFMT.EXE) and partitioning (EDISK.EXE). PFMT.EXE placed a driver EVDR.SYS into the root directory of the boot volume. This was used by

DOS DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems. DOS may also refer to: Computing * Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel * Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicat ...

to retrieve drive and partitioning information located in the last 12 KB of the disk. Priam's EDISK also used dedicated MBR partition IDs 0x45 and 0x5C. Solutions were offered for DOS, NetWare,

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, an ...

and Pick. Priam opened a manufacturing facility in Taiwan in 1987 to move the production of 5.25-inch drives there. After having suffered losses since 1985, the company declared bankruptcy in 1989. It was re-established with the help of external investors as Priam Systems Corp. in 1990, led by Wil Cochran as president and Dick Reiser, a founder of Priam, as vice president. Finally, the disk drive business was sold to Prima International of

Santa Clara, California Santa Clara (; Spanish for " Saint Clare") is a city in Santa Clara County, California. The city's population was 127,647 at the 2020 census, making it the eighth-most populous city in the Bay Area. Located in the southern Bay Area, the cit ...

, a computer peripherals

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, in 1991. Service was provided by Sequel.

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* (NB. An (incomplete) list of hard disk drives produced by Priam.) {{Hard disk drive manufacturers 1978 establishments in California 1991 disestablishments in California 1991 mergers and acquisitions American companies established in 1978 American companies disestablished in 1991 Computer companies established in 1978 Computer companies disestablished in 1991 Computer storage companies Defunct computer companies of the United States Defunct computer hardware companies Manufacturing companies based in San Jose, California

See also

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Further reading

External links