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

San Jose, California San Jose, officially San José (; ; ), is a major city in the U.S. state of California that is the cultural, financial, and political center of Silicon Valley and largest city in Northern California by both population and area. With a 2020 popul ...

, 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. 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 w ...

, which appeared in 1976.

History

In 1983,

Jerry Pournelle Jerry Eugene Pournelle (; August 7, 1933 – September 8, 2017) was an American scientist in the area of operations research and human factors research, a science fiction writer, essayist, journalist, and one of the first bloggers. In the 1960s ...

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 unit ...

'' 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 media He or HE may refer to: Language * He (pronoun), an English pronoun * He (kana), the romanization of the Japanese kana へ * He (letter), the fifth letter of many Semitic alphabets * He (Cyrillic), a letter of the Cyrillic script called ''He'' ...

in 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

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 County ...

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 subsidiar ...

'', in terms of number of employees. In addition, some of Dysan's administrative and disk production facilities, located within the company's Santa Clara, 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 drive A tape drive is a data storage device that reads and writes data on a magnetic tape. Magnetic tape data storage is typically used for offline, archival data storage. Tape media generally has a favorable unit cost and a long archival stability. ...

s and

hard disk drive 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 magnet ...

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 debtor ...

. 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 The floppy disk is a data storage and transfer medium that was ubiquitous from the mid-1970s well into the 2000s. Besides the 3½-inch and 5¼-inch formats used in IBM PC compatible systems, or the 8-inch format that preceded them, many proprie ...

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 storage ...

, with the cover removed

References

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