Dysan was an American storage media manufacturing corporation, formed in 1973 in San Jose,

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

, by

CEO A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especially ...

and former president C. Norman Dion of San Jose, California. It was instrumental in the development of the 5.25"

floppy disk A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a diskette) is an obsolescent type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined ...

, which appeared in 1976.

History

In 1983, Jerry Pournelle reported in ''

BYTE The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable uni ...

'' that a software-publisher friend of his "distributes all his software on Dysan disks. It costs more to begin with, but saves he cost of replacing defective mediain the long run, or so he says". By that year Dysan was a Fortune 500 company, had over 1200 employees, and was ranked as among the top ten private sector employers within the

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo Cou ...

by the ''

San Jose Mercury News ''The Mercury News'' (formerly ''San Jose Mercury News'', often locally known as ''The Merc'') is a morning daily newspaper published in San Jose, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is published by the Bay Area News Group, a subsidia ...

'', in terms of number of employees. In addition, some of Dysan's administrative and disk production facilities, located within the company's Santa Clara, California, manufacturing campus, were regarded as architecturally remarkable. For example, some of Dysan's Santa Clara campus magnetic media manufacturing facilities included architectural features such as large indoor employee lounge atriums, incorporating glass encased ceilings and walls, live indoor lush landscaping, waterfalls, running water creeks, and ponds with live fish. In addition to manufacturing floppies, tape drives and

hard disk A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magn ...

s, Dysan also produced hardware and storage containers for the disks. Dysan merged with Xidex Magnetics in the spring of 1984. In 1997, under the direction of Jerry Ticerelli, Xidex declared

bankruptcy Bankruptcy is a legal process through which people or other entities who cannot repay debts to creditors may seek relief from some or all of their debts. In most jurisdictions, bankruptcy is imposed by a court order, often initiated by the debto ...

. Xidex was absorbed by

Anacomp Anacomp, Inc., is an American company that specializes in computer services and document management. It was founded in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1968 by Ronald D. Palamara, Robert R. Sadaka, and J. Melvin Ebbert, three professors at Purdue Univ ...

and later spun off as a wholly owned subsidiary as Dysan. After a brief re-opening in 2003, the company closed six months later under the direction of Dylan Campbell.

Recycling service

It is possible that Dysan was one of the first tech-based companies to offer a service for recycling used products. Some Dysan packaging included the following label: File:Dysan 3.25" Flex Diskette.jpg, Dysan 3-1/4" floppy disk used in Tabor Drivette drives File:DysanRemovableDiskPack.agr.jpg, Dysan 200 megabyte

disk pack Disk packs and disk cartridges were early forms of removable media for computer data storage, introduced in the 1960s. Disk pack A disk pack is a layered grouping of hard disk platters (circular, rigid discs coated with a magnetic data storag ...

, with the cover removed

References

{{Reflist Computer storage companies Defunct computer hardware companies 1973 establishments in California 1984 disestablishments in California Manufacturing companies established in 1973 Manufacturing companies disestablished in 1984 Companies based in San Jose, California