The Hewlett-Packard HP3013/3014, nicknamed Kittyhawk, was a

hard disk 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 hard disk drive platter, pla ...

drive introduced by

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company. It was founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939 in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California ...

on June 9, 1992. Developed with assistance from

AT&T AT&T Inc., an abbreviation for its predecessor's former name, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the w ...

and manufactured by

Citizen Watch , also known as the Citizen Group, is an electronics company primarily known for its watches and is the core company of a economy of Japan, Japanese global corporation, corporate group based in Nishitokyo, Tokyo, Japan. In addition to Citizen bra ...

, it was the smallest hard disk drive in the world at the time of its launch. Despite its innovative design, the Kittyhawk was ultimately a commercial failure due to its high cost.

History

It was the first ever commercially produced hard drive in a 1.3-inch form factor. The original implementation (model 3013) had the capacity of 20 MB. A 40 MB model called Kittyhawk II (model 3014) was eventually introduced, with the retail price of $499. Both models have IDE interfaces. It appears that some variations of the hard drive were produced with

PC card PC Card is a technical standard specifying an expansion card interface for laptops and personal digital assistants, PDAs. The PCMCIA originally introduced the 16-bit Industry Standard Architecture, ISA-based PCMCIA Card in 1990, but renamed it to ...

interface as well. The drive measured , and weighed about . It was manufactured by Citizen Corporation, at the time a leader in small device manufacturing. The drive featured a number of unique technologies, including a built-in accelerometer that protected the hard drive from falls. Kittyhawk was claimed to be able to survive a drop onto concrete while operating without loss of data. Despite its remarkable characteristics, Kittyhawk turned out to be a commercial failure. It was not in demand from notebook industry due to its inferior cost per megabyte and capacity. A few OEM suppliers adopted the drive, including an early pen based computer maker EO, which ran the GO operating system. The handheld market failed to take off in early 1990s as expected. Many potential markets, such as the video game console market, were missed due to hard drive's high production costs. Kittyhawk was discontinued by HP in September 1994. Approximately 160,000 units were actually sold compared to projected 2-year sales of 700,000 units. In 1996, largely due to Kittyhawk's failure, Hewlett-Packard closed its Disk Memory Division and exited the disk drive business. The story of HP Kittyhawk is described in a

Harvard Business School Harvard Business School (HBS) is the graduate school, graduate business school of Harvard University, a Private university, private Ivy League research university. Located in Allston, Massachusetts, HBS owns Harvard Business Publishing, which p ...

business case "Hewlett-Packard: The Flight of the Kittyhawk", and is a case study in the book ''

The Innovator's Dilemma ''The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail'', first published in 1997, is the best-known work of the Harvard professor and businessman Clayton Christensen. It expands on the concept of disruptive technologies, a ...

'' by Clayton M. Christensen.

References

External links

HP Kittyhawk 1.3" Microdrive

Harvard Business Online: Hewlett-Packard: The Flight of the Kittyhawk
Hard disk drives {{compu-hardware-stub

History

See also

References

External links