The Kittyhawk Hard Drive: A Small Wonder

At a time when disk drives were typically of significant size and weight, Hewlett-Packard’s Kittyhawk was designed to be small enough for personal devices like data assistants or gaming systems. It was produced in a 1.3” form factor — the first commercial drive to be that small — but also contained an impressive 20–40 MB of storage space and was sturdy enough to be dropped without breaking. The Kittyhawk wound up being too far ahead of the market to thrive commercially, but proved Hewlett-Packard’s technical prowess by pushing memory technology to new heights.