Pieces of bankrupt Priam Corp have been scattered all over the place, but the most valuable are probably the ones that have ended up at a new company, Orca Technology Inc, formed by former Maxtor Corp vice-president of engineering Michael Warner, former Priam division general manager Richard Reiser and former Televideo Systems Inc chief financial officer Won-Gil Choe to buy and operate the designs, international patents, tools, fixtures, themanufacturing pilot lines, inventory and documentation for Pri-am’s 5.25 760Mb Falcon and 3.5 400Mb Shrike drives. Orca also acquired extensive material assets such as furniture, general laboratory and testing equipment. Terms of the purchase were not disclosed, but Orca says that the assets acquired represent investment by Priam of more than $16m before it folded. The new company looks to start shipping to the OEM market before the end of the year and is particularly excited about the high capacity 3.5 drives. The strategy for the 5.25 market is to sell to value-added resellers and dealers and direct to OEM customers as a second source. It also plans to announce a greater than 1Gb drive in 1991. Orca is evaluating off-shore manufacturing companies as potential partners for high volume production, and is recruiting technical people to assist the start of pilot production and do research and development work for future products in San Jose. It moved last week into a 17,000 square foot headquarters facility in San Jose. Rights to maintain and repair the Priam disk drives already in the field went to Unisys Corp spin-out Sequel Inc, Santa Clara and the disk subsystems integration business was sold to a new Priam Systems company.
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