SyQuest Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: SYQT)[1] was an early entrant into the hard disk drive market for personal computers. The company was founded on January 27, 1982 [2] by Syed Iftikar who had been a founder of Seagate,[3] along with Ben Alaimo, Bill Krajewski, Anil Nigam and George Toldi.[4] Its earliest products were the SQ306R, a 5 MB 3.9" (100 mm) cartridge disk drive and associated Q-Pak cartridge for IBM XT compatibles.[5] Subsequently a non-removable medium version was announced, the SQ306F.[6]
 | |
| Company type | Public |
|---|---|
| Industry | Data storage |
| Founded | 1982; 42 years ago (1982)inFremont, California, United States |
| Founder |
|
| Defunct | 2003 (2003) |
| Fate | Partially acquired by Iomega |
For many years, SyQuest was the most popular means of transferring large desktop publisher documents such as advertisements to professional printers. SyQuest marketed its products as able 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 and archiving, along with confidential data security and easy portability for the road.
The company was named partially after the founder, Syed Iftikar, because of a company meeting wherein it was decided that "SyQuest" ought to be a shortened name for "Sy's Quest".
Its earliest product family of 3.9" (100 mm) cartridge disk drives and associated Q-Pak cartridges achieved limited success in government markets where removable media were required for security purposes.
In 1986, SyQuest announced the SQ555 and its SQ400 associated cartridge, a 44 MB 5¼-inch removable cartridge hard disk drive, using the industry standard 130 mm disk as its medium.[7] Double capacity versions, the SQ5110 and SQ800 were introduced in 1991. This generation of products became the de facto standard in the Apple Macintosh world to store, transfer and backup large amounts of data such as generated by graphic artists, musicians and engineers.[8]
SyQuest went public on the NASDAQ in 1991.[9]
In early 1996, the company cut 60% of its workforce;[10] later that year, company namesake Syed Iftikar was fired "in a management shakeup."[11]
After 1997, SyQuest did not fare well in the market. Their core desktop publishing customers began increasingly to use CD-R media and FTP to transfer files, while Iomega's Zip drives dominated 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 those 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.
They company laid off half of its staff in August 1998 before filing for bankruptcy by the end of the year.[12][1] Portions of the company were purchased by Iomega Corp. in January 1999, with SyQuest retaining the right to sell its remaining inventory on condition of renaming themselves SYQT. While the company's original syquest.com website continued to provide technical support for its original products until 2003, its rebranded syqt.com website became a digital disk drive and media retailer. By 2009 that website ceased to exist, with its domain (www.syqt.com) put up for sale in the Chinese market.
Syquest's product line included such devices as the following:[13]
Fixed Media Drives (unformatted capacity):
Removable Media Drives (formatted capacity):
The 5.25" removable-disk hard drives with 44 MB, 88 MB, and 200 MB capacities were mostly used on Macintosh systems via the SCSI interface.