The story
The company was founded on January 27, 1982 by Syed Iftikar who had been a founder of Seagate, along with Ben Alaimo, Bill Krajewski, Anil Nigam and George Toldi.
The company was named partially after the founder, Syed Iftikar, because of a company meeting wherein it was decided that "SyQuest" ought to be a shortened name for "Sy's Quest".
The company announced its first product family of 3.9" (100 mm) cartridge disk drives and associated Q-Pak cartridges at the 1982 National Computer Conference, surprising observers with the low price of $750 for the drive and $35 for a cartridge. They achieved limited success in government markets where removable media were required for security purposes.
In 1986, SyQuest announced the SQ555 and its SQ400 associated cartridge, a 44 MB 5¼-inch removable cartridge hard disk drive, using the industry standard 130 mm disk as its medium. Double capacity versions, the SQ5110 and SQ800 were introduced in 1991. This generation of products became the de facto standard in the Apple Macintosh world to store, transfer, and backup large amounts of data such as generated by graphic artists, musicians, and engineers.
SyQuest went public on the NASDAQ in 1991.
Bankruptcy
In early 1996, the company cut 60% of its workforce; later that year, company namesake Syed Iftikar was fired "in a management shakeup."
After 1997, SyQuest did not fare well in the market. Their core desktop publishing customers began increasingly to use CD-R media and FTP to transfer files, while Iomega's Zip drives dominated the small office/home office market. Over the period 1995 to 1997, sales declined, resulting in a series of losses. In the first quarter of 1997, those losses had been reduced to $6.8 million with net revenues increasing to $48.3 million. This compares to a net loss of $33.8 million, or $2.98 per share, on net revenues of $78.7 million for the same period the year before.
They company laid off half of its staff in August 1998 before filing for bankruptcy by the end of the year. Portions of the company were purchased by Iomega Corp. in January 1999, with SyQuest retaining the right to sell its remaining inventory on condition of renaming themselves SYQT. Although the company's original syquest.com website continued to provide technical support for its original products until 2003, its rebranded syqt.com website became a digital disk drive and media retailer. By 2009, that website ceased to exist, with its domain (www.syqt.com) put up for sale in the Chinese market.
From Wikipedia’s article on SyQuest Technology, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4