MiniScribe

MiniScribe was a manufacturer of disk storage products, founded in Longmont, Colorado in 1980. MiniScribe designed and sold stepper motor-based hard disk drives with a large amount of onboard logic for the time. They eventually moved into higher-profile voice coil motor designs, and won major contracts with IBM. They were a relatively well-known brand through the early 1980s.

The company was started by Terry Johnson, who had a 20-year career in the hard drive business at such companies as IBM, Memorex and Storage Technology Corporation. MiniScribe became a major player when it won a series of contracts to supply IBM's PC division, and their subsequent rapid growth led to an initial public offering in late 1983, opening for trading in January 1984. However, slow sales of the IBM XT led IBM to dramatically scale back their orders late that year, forcing MiniScribe to lay off 26% of its staff and causing the value of the stock plummet. Johnson left the company; at the time he stated that he had been planning to do this for some time and that his departure had "absolutely nothing" to do with IBM. Johnson would later comment that "It's a very low inertia industry, you can blow your way into it and get blown out of it very quickly." Roger Gower, recently promoted to President, took over the CEO role as well.

Shortly thereafter the company was recapitalized with a $20 million investment from Hambrecht & Quist (H&Q), a venture capital firm. One of H&Q's officers was Quentin Thomas ("QT") Wiles, a turnaround specialist nicknamed "Dr. Fix-It". Wiles took over the CEO position from Gower, running the company remotely from his office in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles, with a management team made up primarily of accountants. The company soon returned to profitability, with sales increasing from $114 million at the height of IBM's orders, to $603 million by 1988, when they were named the most well-managed company in the disk drive industry. Their major customer at this time was Compaq, but the company was also bidding for major contracts with Apple Computer and Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).

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