We have a long history of storage systems design and support

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When we started in 1985, hard disks were astronomically expensive and reserved to the IT departments of large corporations.

Our first product was an external floppy disk drive for the then revolutionary Apple Macintosh computer. It was 3.5" double sided and we were very proud of ourselves. The price was about half of the imported product and as failures were very rare, we retrospectively increased the warranty from 12 to 24 months. (At a time when the imported product only came with 3 months' warranty, this became a major feature). We subsequently received two national awards for this product and we were really proud as the awards were voted by the readers of the specialist Macworld magazine.

Our next product was an external SCSI hard disk drive - again for the Macintosh computer. Thing is, there was no such thing as a native SCSI hard disk drive at the time. Hard disks were just starting to appear in 3.5"-1/2 height format but they still had the interfaces of their bigger 5.25" cousins - the ST506 interface (that is Shugart Technology's extension of their floppy disks' interface into the hard disk arena). We needed to then setup a SCSI to ST506 controller and write device drivers that would "pull themseves up by their bootstraps" (hence booting a computer) by squeezing all the initialisation data onto the first and only readable track of the drive. In addition to the amazing 20 Megabytes of storage ;-) our external drive featured a hybrid ceramic switch mode power supply - a technology that was (and still largely is) reserved for military uses. We received another national award for this drive as well as telephone calls to the effect that "it's really nice and fast but why did you make it so big? I'll never be able to fill it for the rest of my life!"

Understandable at a time when the operating system, the application and the document could fit onto a 400 kilobyte floppy but laughable in the light of the current hard disk capacities measured in Terabytes...