History (1988): Tecmate Into FDDs

Tecmate was the first company in Taiwan to manufacture a 3.5-inch FDD.

The first product, a single-sided model, was announced in 1984.

A double-sided version was available a year later, and though sales have been steady, Tecmate expects sales to increase considerably this year as the PS/2 series becomes more popular.

The Taiwanese company manufactures its drives in its plant in Neihu, a suburb of Taipei, and employs a staff of 112, 15 of whom are in R&D. Tecmate ships to countries all over the world.

Its largest orders are from the European market. Until now the biggest market for Tecmate’s drives has been for use with the Apple Macintosh. Though the company is optimistic about the PS/2 market, the Macintosh will still represent a large portion of the company’s sales.

The firm developed its disk drives with the help of Shugart, a major US disk drive manufacturer. All the necessary testing and manufacturing equipment was bought from that company, and Tecmate’s drives are made according to specifications provided by Shugart. The motor is purchased from Shugart, while the head comes from Hong Kong. Tecmate attempted to manufacture its ownheads, but found that it was more economical to import them. Tecmate has not yet carried out its plans to assemble its own heads,and has as yet failed to find areliable local supplier.

For the Macintosh, Tecmate offers two versions, the NPH-3001 and the NPH-3002. The first model is single-sided and has an unformatted capacity of 500KB and a formatted capacity of 400KB. The second one is double-sided with double capacity. Both models are stand-alone types and are housed in beige steel cases.

Tecmate also offers an internal IBM-compatible model, the NPH-302, which is a double-sided drive with an unformatted capacity of 1MB. This model supports 160tracks per side with 135tpi. The track to track access time is 6ms and the data transfer rate 250KB/s. Prices for the NPH-3002 and NPH-302 are about $100 for small quantities.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠7, volume ≠1, published on August 1988.