The Hewlett-Packard HP3013/3014, nicknamed Kittyhawk, was a

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 magnet ...

drive introduced by

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...

on June 9, 1992. At the time of its introduction, it was the smallest hard disk drive in the world, being only 1.3-inches in size. The drive was created by a collaboration between

, AT&T, and

Citizen Watch is an electronics company primarily known for its watches and is the core company of a Japanese global corporate group based in Nishitokyo, Tokyo, Japan. In addition to Citizen brand watches, it is the parent of American watch company Bulova, an ...

History

It was the first ever commercially produced hard drive in a 1.3 inch form factor. The original implementation (model 3013) had the capacity of 20 MB. A 40 MB model called Kittyhawk II (model 3014) was eventually introduced, with the retail price of $499. Both models have IDE interfaces. It appears that some variations of the hard drive were produced with

PC card In computing, PC Card is a configuration for computer parallel communication peripheral interface, designed for laptop computers. Originally introduced as PCMCIA, the PC Card standard as well as its successors like CardBus were defined and devel ...

interface as well. The drive measured 2.0" x 1.44" x 0.414" (50.8 mm x 36.5 mm x 10.5 mm), and weighed about 1 ounce (28 g). It was manufactured by Citizen Corporation, at the time a leader in small device manufacturing. The drive featured a number of unique technologies, including a built-in accelerometer that protected the hard drive from falls. Kittyhawk was claimed to be able to survive a 3-foot drop onto concrete while operating without loss of data. Despite its remarkable characteristics, Kittyhawk turned out to be a commercial failure. It was not in demand from notebook industry due to its inferior cost per megabyte and capacity. A few OEM suppliers adopted the drive, including an early pen based computer maker EO, which ran the GO operating system. The handheld market failed to take off in early 1990s as expected. Many potential markets, such as the video game console market, were missed due to hard drive's high production costs. Kittyhawk was discontinued by HP in September 1994. Approximately 160,000 units were actually sold compared to projected 2-year sales of 700,000 units. In 1996, largely due to Kittyhawk's failure, Hewlett Packard closed its Disk Memory Division and exited the disk drive business. The story of HP Kittyhawk is described in a

Harvard Business School Harvard Business School (HBS) is the graduate business school of Harvard University, a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. It is consistently ranked among the top business schools in the world and offers a large full-time MBA p ...

business case "Hewlett-Packard: The Flight of the Kittyhawk", and is a case study in the book ''

The Innovator's Dilemma ''The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail'', first published in 1997, is the best-known work of the Harvard professor and businessman Clayton Christensen. It expands on the concept of disruptive technologies, a te ...

'' by

Clayton M. Christensen Clayton Magleby Christensen (April 6, 1952January 23, 2020) was an American academic and business consultant who developed the theory of " disruptive innovation", which has been called the most influential business idea of the early 21st century ...

Specifications

Models

References

External links

HP Kittyhawk 1.3" Microdrive

Harvard Business Online: Hewlett-Packard: The Flight of the Kittyhawk

History

Specifications

Models

References

External links

See also