MiniScribe

MiniScribe was a manufacturer of disk storage products, founded in Longmont, Colorado in 1980. MiniScribe designed and sold stepper motor-based hard disk drives with a large amount of onboard logic for the time. They eventually moved into higher-profile voice coil motor designs, at which time, Terry G. Johnson retired and sold the company. The company then went bankrupt in 1990, and their assets, sans liabilities, were subsequently purchased by Maxtor of San Jose, California. MiniScribe’s failure centered on one of the first major accounting scandals in the computer industry; after losing a supply contract with IBM's PC division in 1985, MiniScribe falsified its sales records for several years before being discovered in 1989. The primary scandal erupted in the final weeks of 1989, when after failing to procure short-term financing, the company executives decided to embark upon a fraudulent course of action to bring in the financing unwittingly from their customers.