Whatever Happened To...

Hewlett-Packard's Kittyhawk?

Nick Baran

(see "HP Delivers Matchbox-Size Hard Drive," July 1992 BYTE, page 32)

Hewlett-Packard's 1.3-inch Kittyhawk hard drive, which packed about 20 MB of disk storage into a rotating hard drive about the size of a matchbox, was a marvel of miniaturization. The drive's components were so small and precise that HP joined forces with Japanese watch company Citizen to manufacture the drive. But HP discontinued the line last year, citing lower-than-expected sales.

Eric Larson, HP's operations manager for mobile storage, says the company designed the Kittyhawk for use in mobile-computing devices, such as PDAs (personal digital assistants) and small hand-held devices, and nontraditional applications, such as game machines and printers. In 1993, HP t ried to remedy one weakness of the Kittyhawk--its low capacity--by releasing a second implementation of the drive that doubled its capacity to 40 MB.

But Larson says the main factor in HP's decision to discontinue the line was weak sales in the subnotebook market. "The subnotebook market had trouble developing and is still in trouble today," he says. "Products didn't come out and were either canceled or delayed."

HP has manufactured the drive in small quantities since 1991 to satisfy its contracts with vendors, but it will end production this summer. According to Larson, HP is applying the knowledge it gained in manufacturing technology and automation during the Kittyhawk project to its factories in Penang, Malaysia, and Boise, Idaho. As far as getting back into the market with the Kittyhawk, Larson says, "We'll watch and see what happens."