MiniStor
public American computer hardware company
MiniStor Peripherals, Inc., was a public American computer hardware company based in San Jose, California, and active from 1991 to 1995. The company was the first to manufacture and market PC Card spinning hard drives, based on the 1.8-inch hard drive specification invented earlier by Intégral. The company briefly rode a wave of success in this market before dissolving amid bankruptcy proceedings in April 1995.
History
Foundation (1991–1992)
MiniStor Peripherals was founded in May 1991 by Alex Malaccorto and James "Jim" Miller in San Jose, California. Both had previously worked for Maxtor Corporation, another manufacturer of hard drives, in various executive positions. MiniStor received seed funding from multiple investors, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, amounting to $4.2 million by the time of its incorporation—an uncharacteristically large sum for computer-related seed financing at the time. By January 1992, before the company had any products on the market, the company employed 70 from its San Jose office.
MiniStor was the second company, behind Intégral Peripherals of Colorado, to announce production of 1.8-inch hard drives. The 1.8-inch drive standard attempted to supplant the industry-standard 2.5-inch drive pioneered by PrairieTek in 1988. In September 1991, the company began planning the groundbreaking of a 25,000-square-foot manufacturing plant in Singapore to mass-produce the company's 1.8-inch drives.
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This entry incorporates text from “MiniStor” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.