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Katherine Johnson’s mathematical calculations helped guide some of America’s most important early space missions while she confronted the racial and gender barriers faced by Black women in twentieth-century America.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
| MiniStor Peripherals, Inc. | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Type | Public |
| Industry | Computer storage |
| Founded | May 1991 in San Jose, California, United States |
| Founders |
|
| Defunct | April 1995 |
| Fate | Bankruptcy liquidation |
Number of employees | 170 (1995, peak)[1] |
MiniStor Peripherals, Inc., was a public American computer hardware company based in San Jose, California, and active from 1991 to 1995. The company was the first to manufacture and market PC Card spinning hard drives, based on the 1.8-inch hard drive specification invented earlier by Intégral. The company briefly rode a wave of success in this market before dissolving amid bankruptcy proceedings in April 1995.
MiniStor Peripherals was founded in May 1991 by Alex Malaccorto and James "Jim" Miller in San Jose, California.[2][3] Both had previously worked for Maxtor Corporation, another manufacturer of hard drives, in various executive positions.[4] MiniStor received seed funding from multiple investors, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, amounting to $4.2 million by the time of its incorporation—an uncharacteristically large sum for computer-related seed financing at the time.[5][6] By January 1992, before the company had any products on the market, the company employed 70 from its San Jose office.[7]
MiniStor was the second company, behind Intégral Peripherals of Colorado, to announce production of 1.8-inch hard drives. The 1.8-inch drive standard attempted to supplant the industry-standard 2.5-inch drive pioneered by PrairieTek in 1988.[3] In September 1991, the company began planning the groundbreaking of a 25,000-square-foot manufacturing plant in Singapore to mass-produce the company's 1.8-inch drives. In opposition to standard practice for developing new hard drive technologies, the company planned to send their specifications for their drives straight to Singapore, skipping domestic production sampling that would have allowed them to fine-tune production. Malaccorto cited the breakneck pace of the disk drive industry as their reason for skipping this process.[8]
In March 1992, the company announced their first products, the MiniPort line of hard drives. The first products in this line, the MiniPort 32(P) and the MiniPort 64(P), had formatted capacities of 32 MB and 64 MB respectively; units suffixed with P had a PC Card interface for laptop users, while non-suffixed units had a proprietary straight-through IDE-compatible port for embedded applications.[9][10] Released in late 1992,[11] the 32P and 64P were the first PC Card spinning hard drives. As customer surveys overwhelmingly saw PC Cards as the breakout application for 1.8-inch drives, MiniStor decided to focus their efforts on this segment.[12] Manufacturing of the MiniPort's controller circuitry, populated with controller chips by Zilog and Adaptec, was performed by nearby GSS/Array Technology.[12][13] Meanwhile, MiniStor obtained their thin-film magnetic platters from Komag and their read–write heads from Dastek.[12]
The MiniPort drives had a rated MTBF of one hundred thousand stops and starts, significantly lower than Intégral's one million.[12] Miller conceded that Intégral's drives were more reliable because of their ability to park the heads fully off the platter but contended that the drives' traditional landing zone scheme provided enough power cycles for their customer base.[10][12] A fringe benefit of the traditional scheme was faster spin-up times: MiniStor's drives were able to load up from standby in one second.[14] MiniPort's drives parked the heads into the loading zone via a mechanical latch instead of energizing a magnetic coil, a technique first used by the founder's former employer Maxtor that reduced power draw.[15]
MiniStor grew to 130 employees in early 1993.[13] In January 1993, the company introduced 42-MB and 85-MB versions of the MiniPort.[11] The company's 1.8-inch drive line topped out in raw capacity with the MiniPort 128, introduced in November 1993, which had a formatted capacity of 128-MB (available in IDE and PC Card variants).[16][17] They were able to eke out more capacity, however, with the announcement of the MP260P3, which used Stac Electronics' disk-compression algorithm on-chip.[18]
Alongside the MiniPort 128, MiniStor also introduced the Dockit Socket, an adapter for desktop computers that slot into either a 5.25-inch or 3.5-inch drive bay and provided the desktop with one PC Card bus slot.[16] The Dockit Socket the first of two non-drive related products sold by MiniStor; the other was a shock-abosrbing, ruggedized rubber casing called the Pocket Socket.[16][19] In late 1993, MiniStor received capital funding from Hitachi, who also signed a deal with MiniStor to supply the latter with manufacturing lines in Japan in exchange for MiniStor's services in developing both 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch hard drive lines for Hitachi.[20][21] MiniStor's first 2.5-inch drives, jointly developed with Hitachi, debuted in May 1994.[22]
MiniStor filed its initial public offering in August 1994, underwritten by Punk, Ziegel & Knoell and D. Blech & Company.[23] The company's stock valuation dropped dramatically after its principal underwriter D. Blech collapsed on September 22, 1994 (so-called "Blech Thursday") after failing to meet Nasdaq's capital requirements.[24][25] MiniStor briefly manufactured desktop 3.5-inch hard drives before filing Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April 1995 with plans to liquidate its assets.[26][1]
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Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
MiniStor Peripherals, Inc., was a public American computer hardware company based in San Jose, California, and active from 1991 to 1995. The company was the first to manufacture and market PC Card spinning hard drives, based on the 1.8-inch hard drive specification invented earlier by Intégral. The company briefly rode a wave of success in this market before dissolving amid bankruptcy proceedings in April 1995.
London Ministores (in the past London Ministore) is a commercial center located in the corner of the streets Sha'ul HaMelekh and Ibn Gabirol in Tel Aviv Center, Israel, in the first floor and the basement floor of "Ne'ot Aviv House". The center was built in 1972 and was designed by the architects Binyamin Idelson, Ya'acov Herts and Gershon Tsipor. Because of ownership changes, the planning of the tower was done separately from the planning of the commercial area by the architect Baruh Meshulam. The center is a complex of mixed uses which includes institutions like Tsavta Club and Bat Dor Band, a commercial center which contains shops and restaurants, and above it two floors of offices. Above these floors there is a residence building of 15 floors which was one of the first residential towers in the country built as a "luxury building". During the construction of the complex one of the construction workers was killed. On May 16, 1993, a fire broke out following a gas leak, and the building was repaired and reinhabited in 1994. Some of the stores in the shopping center have access directly from the street, but most of them can be reached only by entering the doors of the commercial center. This structure has caused a legal conflict between Tel Aviv municipality and the shop owners, about whether the public area inside the commercial area has a status of a street. At the court ruling of the district court in Tel Aviv the municipality's argument was rejected, and it was ruled that the public area is not a street since it is not an open place.
Harrel Gordon Tillman Sr. (January 18, 1925 - June 19, 1998) was an actor who became an ordained minister and moved to Houston Texas where he also became a lawyer and judge. He was the first African-American judge in Texas. Tillman was born January 18, 1923, in Wadesboro, North Carolina. He grew up in Philadelphia and graduated from Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina. After college he moved to New York, where he had a brief stage career. Tillman then moved to Hollywood in 1947 where he appeared in a number of low budget films made with African American crews and casts including That Man of Mine, Love in Syncopation and The Fight Never Ends. He left the movie business and joined the clergy of the African Methodist Episcopal church in New York City serving as an assistant pastor before becoming an ordained minister. In the early 1950s he was transferred to a church in Houston, and served as an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, In Harlem he was an assistant pastor at Harlem's Church on the Hill and then he was the pastor at the Walls Chapel in Houston. Tillman led a gospel music program on local radio and hosted a talk show on radio station KYOK in Houston. Tillman was admitted to the Texas bar in 1962 and in 1964 was named to the municipal court. He served as a general counsel on the Texas Joint Legislative Committee on Prison Reform and as a delegate to the Texas Democratic Party convention. He was unsuccessful in a bid for a seat in Congress in 1978 and 1982. Tillman was interviewed for the book Black Cinema Treasures. He died of cancer on June 19, 1998 in Houston, at the age of 73.
At least 218 companies have manufactured hard disk drives (HDDs) since 1956. Most of that industry has vanished through bankruptcy or mergers and acquisitions. None of the first several entrants (including IBM, who invented the HDD) continue in the industry today. Only three manufacturers have survived—Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital (WD)—all of which grew at least in part through mergers and acquisitions.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Shirley Chisholm, elected in 1968.