Tandon Corporation

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The Tandon Corporation was an American computer hardware company known for floppy drives and later personal computers. It was founded in 1975 in Chatsworth, California by Sirjang Lal Tandon, a former mechanical engineer. The company started by making magnetic heads for floppy drives and used low-cost production in India to keep costs down.

In the late 1970s, Tandon built direct equivalents to Shugart floppy drives and introduced double-sided, double-density (DS/DD) drives, which became their main products by the early 1980s. In 1979 they released the TM100 5.25-inch drive with 40 tracks, more than the 35 tracks of the Shugart SA-400. When Tandy launched the TRS-80 Model III in 1980, it used TM100 drives. In 1981 IBM released its Personal Computer, and Tandon became the sole floppy-drive supplier for IBM PCs through 1985, first with the single-sided drive used in the TRS-80 and then the TM100-2 double-sided drive.

Because of this, Tandon grew to be the world’s largest independent maker of disk drives for personal computers and word processors.

In the mid-1980s, Tandon added hard disk drives, making several models based on a similar design with a distinctive P-shaped top cover and a side-mounted pinion rack stepper motor. They also offered portable hard drives that could be removed from PCs.

A downturn in North American computer sales in 1984–85 and competition from Japanese and Taiwanese manufacturers hurt the company. In April 1987, Tandon bought hard drive maker Atasi Corporation for $5 million in stock to boost capacity, since Atasi offered up to 170 MB compared with about 50 MB for Tandon at the time.

Tandon sold its original data-storage business to Western Digital for nearly $80 million in 1988. The company then tried to remake itself as a leading PC producer by bringing in former IBM executives and other industry veterans. By 1989, about 90% of its PC sales were in Europe, and the stock had fallen from a 1983 high of $34.25 to around $0.50.

One of its computers, the PCX, was released in 1986. It came with 256 KB of RAM, an 80-column monitor, two 5.25-inch drives, a 10 MB hard drive, MS-DOS, and GW-BASIC.