Anyone who used computers in the mid-'90s well remembers that the storage situation could be desperate. Users needed a better solution than the classic floppy disks, and the market responded with different formats from names like Iomega and SyQuest. But a small company called Avatar promised something very close to perfection: high capacity, low cost, and portability. That promise became the Avatar Shark 250... and very few people remember that product.
As a user of Iomega's Zip disks, I can say I experienced the best and worst of that format. The best because storing 100 megabytes in something not much bigger than a floppy was a cry of freedom... and the worst because when a drive decided to destroy disks, there was no turning back.
But Iomega wasn't alone in that dance. Its toughest competitor was SyQuest, with its EZDrive, EZFlyer, and SyJet facing the Zip and Jaz. Both companies managed to achieve a good position; however, Colin from "This Does Not Compute" tells us in his latest video the brief story of a third player: the Avatar Shark 250.
Avatar Shark: 250-Megabyte Disks, Smaller Than a Floppy
The Avatar Shark debuted in early 1997 as a portable external unit that could be connected via the parallel port (with passthrough support), and months later, with a PC Card interface for portable systems. Its price was relatively competitive at $300 for the unit and $40 per disk. Contemporary benchmarks placed the Avatar Shark below the Jaz SCSI but beating all Iomega products with parallel connection.
And yet, nobody bought it. What happened? First, Avatar was a new and relatively unknown name in the market, while Iomega and SyQuest had already been offering storage solutions for over a decade. Second, its technology wasn't entirely stable. Avatar used the concept of the "hard diskette", meaning the platter was in the disks, while both the motor and the heads remained in the unit. If someone made the mistake of leaving a disk inside the Avatar Shark during transport, they risked ruining the whole mechanism and losing data.
Avatar's commercial agreements weren't good either, as its technology only found space in Dauphin laptops that also failed to gain traction. An aggressive advertising campaign led to significant discounts (the Shark got as low as $199 with a rebate), but by mid-1998, those who participated in that offer didn't even receive the checks, because Avatar had declared bankruptcy. At the end of the line, the price per disk still favored Iomega (despite lower capacity), and its units were cheaper. Users' vision became more conservative, and nobody wanted to store their data in dead formats.
In the last part of the video, Colin explains that he had never heard about Avatar... and I must admit the same. It's the first time I've come across the Avatar Shark, and that's saying something, having witnessed the rise and fall of many technologies over the decades. There's always something new to learn...
