Syed Iftikar

SyQuest Technology, Inc. NASDAQ: SYQT was an early entrant into the hard disk drive market for personal computers. The company was started in 1982, by Syed Iftikar who had been a founder of Seagate. 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. Subsequently a non-removable medium version was announced, the SQ306F.

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 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. 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.

SyQuest went public on the NASDAQ in 1991.

After 1997, SyQuest did not fare well in the market. Their core desktop publishing customers began increasingly to use CD-R media and 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.

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