Conner Peripherals, Inc. (commonly referred to as Conner), was a company that manufactured

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s for

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. Conner Peripherals was founded in 1985 by

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co-founder and

San Jose State University San José State University (San Jose State or SJSU) is a Public university, public research university in San Jose, California. Established in 1857, SJSU is the List of oldest schools in California, oldest public university on the West Coast of ...

alumnus Finis Conner (1943– ). In 1986, they merged with CoData, a Colorado start-up founded by MiniScribe founders Terry Johnson and John Squires. CoData was developing a new type of small hard disk that put the capacity of a 5.25-inch drive into the smaller (and now commonplace) 3.5-inch format.

Hard disks

Design concepts

Conner's drives were notable for eschewing the "tub" type of head-disk assembly, where the disks are inside a large base casting shaped like a square

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or vault with a flat lid; instead, they preferred the flat base plate approach, which was more resistant to

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and less likely to warp or deform when heated. Their first drives had the base plate carrying the disks, head arm and actuator enclosed inside a long aluminum cartridge, fixed to a bulkhead on the other side with two screws and sealed with a large, square

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. Conner's 1/3-height (1-inch thick) drives used a domed, cast aluminum lid with four screws, one on each corner, sealed to the base plate with a rubber gasket. The

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was bolted to the bottom of the base plate, with the mounting holes for the drive drilled into tabs cast into the sides of the base plate. This design would be Conner's trademark look well into the 1990s. Logically, Conner's drives had some of the characteristics of the original MiniScribe drives (of which John Squires had also been a designer), with a large amount of intelligence built into the drive's

central processing unit A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor, or just processor, is the primary Processor (computing), processor in a given computer. Its electronic circuitry executes Instruction (computing), instructions ...

(CPU); Conner drives used a single

Motorola 68HC11 The 68HC11 (also abbreviated as 6811 or HC11) is an 8-bit microcontroller family introduced by Motorola Semiconductor in 1984 (later from Freescale then NXP). It descended from the Motorola 6800 microprocessor by way of the 6801. The 68HC11 d ...

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, and ran a proprietary

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that implemented the track-following algorithms (the "servo" system) in software, as well as managing the bus interface.

Corporate history

Conner Peripherals was founded in June 1985 and located in San Jose CA. However it did not produce any product until after it merged into and with CoData,

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, in February 1986.Conner Peripherals Prospectus, April 12, 1988 It began shipping its first products based upon the CoData design in early 1987, initially to Compaq. During calendar 1987 Compaq represented about 90% of Conner Peripheral's sales. In 1990, Conner Peripherals set a record by reaching $1.337 billion in sales in four years, without acquisitions, making it the fastest-growing manufacturing start-up in United States history.Langan, Patricia A., ''America's Fastest Growing Company,'' Fortune, August 13, 1990

References

Bibliography

* ''International Directory of Company Histories, Vol. 6''; St. James Press; 1992.

External links