Pinnacle Micro was started by the Blum family: William Blum and Nellie Blum, both 59, and their son Scott Blum, 29. After a 30-year career at mostly big firms in Silicon Valley, William Blum started the firm in 1987 as a maker of add-on memory boards. Memory boards made some money, but it did not take Blum long to realize that the memory was destined to be a commodity. Looking for a less commodity-like product, the Blums decided to become resellers of Sony's magneto-optical disk drive. Customers complained that the drive was too slow and expensive. So the Blums decided to invest in some research and development on the side, secretly opening a lab in Colorado with the mission of making a rewritable, high-density drive as fast as a magnetic hard disk. In 1992, Pinnacle began selling a disk drive with the capacity, access, and retrieval speed of a hard disk, but the important difference is that the disk could be plucked out like a floppy. Pinnacle's current model packs 650 meagabytes of information on a disk.