Priam Corporation

Priam Corporation was a company located in <a href="/facts/San_Jose,_California/PCaTmTDq">San Jose, California</a>, founded in 1978 by William Schroeder and Al Wilson, two former <a href="/facts/Memorex/GdKc2Adr">Memorex</a> executives, as a manufacturer of <a href="/facts/Hard_disk_drive/kekLSGSE">hard disk drives</a>. Originally, they made high-capacity 14-inch drives, developed for <a href="/facts/Mainframe_computer/nrBR6rWa">mainframe computers</a>, available for <a href="/facts/Minicomputer/g8hvpQxe">minicomputers</a> 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 <a href="/facts/IEEE-488/JdmHrwJB">IEEE-488</a> interface for <a href="/facts/Commodore_PET/08R12Xk4">Commodore PET</a>/CBM computers or the Priam DataTower series, external storage solutions, combining high-capacity hard disks and <a href="/facts/Streamer_(tape_drive)/9MfLuCa0">streamers</a> in a single case, which could interface to various computers including <a href="/facts/IBM_PC/yhcJGMPL">IBM PCs</a>.
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 <a href="/facts/MS-DOS/fVrrz1uN">MS-DOS</a> prior to the release of version 3.31/4.0. This included custom hard disk controllers (based on <a href="/facts/Western_Digital/Yqc4qS3l">Western Digital</a> 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 <a href="/facts/DOS/sWwDXNmX">DOS</a> to retrieve drive and partitioning information located in the last 12 KB of the disk. Priam's EDISK also used dedicated <a href="/facts/Master_boot_record/nEJerupp">MBR</a> <a href="/facts/Partition_ID/su2cLH6o">partition IDs</a> 0x45 and 0x5C. Solutions were offered for DOS, <a href="/facts/NetWare/cfnyxMzs">NetWare</a>, <a href="/facts/Unix/0pNL2seI">Unix</a> and <a href="/facts/Pick_(operating_system)/LSXLknzu">Pick</a>.
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 <a href="/facts/Santa_Clara,_California/lkQTssCF">Santa Clara, California</a>, a computer peripherals <a href="/facts/Value-added_reseller/pxI6fsPs">VAR</a>, in 1991. Service was provided by Sequel.

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Priam Corporation