Although it got its announcement in first, Micropolis Corp isn’t the only company with a 1Gb 3.5 disk drive – IBM Corp is hard on its heels. According to Electronic News, IBM’s OEM Systems Division last week showed consultants a 1Gb 3.5 drive, 1 high 100Mb and 200Mb 3.5 drives, and 2.5 drives that store 40Mb and 86Mb. All are planned to be available in the second half of this year. In the early 1980s, IBM Corp introduced its first OEM products – the Piccolo 8 disk drive and the 3101 ASCII display terminal. It had high hopes for the former, but the product was overpriced and it won few takers for it, and the 3101 was only a modest success. Nevertheless, the company made it clear in private briefings that it had marked out OEM business as a major growth area – low key it may be but IBM is quietly building an OEM empire, we wrote way back in December 1982. But things did not go quite to plan, and despite OEM deals with Siemens AG and Honeywell Inc for 3380 disk drives, and a steady improvement in the products IBM offered on the OEM market, its target of a third of turnover by the mid-1980s from OEM business was very far from being met. Now however the company is attacking the market with renewed vigour, with its small form factor disk drives leading the way, and is once again expressing determination to become a major player, according to the Wall Street Journal saying that it will make a few more OEM announcements this year and one a month in 1992. The most striking deal so far – and the one that makes clear that nothing is ruled out – is the one with Mitsubishi Electric Corp, which is taking the entire ES/9000 9121 mainframe line OEM in Japan. It is not likely that any troubled European manufacturer would do that, but the RS/6000 Unix machine looks like a strong contender for OEM business.
