On December 6, 2002, IBM departed the hard drive business with a whimper. IBM Deskstar drives were among the best drives in the industry. Licensing Deskstar technology from IBM in 1999 saved Western Digital. But we don’t call IBM hard drives Deskstars anymore. We call them death stars. It was all because of one misstep IBM made right around the turn of the century.

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.










