As early as the late 1980s Quantum Corp. saw which way the wind was blowing and attempted to reposition itself away from its traditional business of supplying small disk drives to PC manufacturers.

FORBES: Serendigity

It has no mechanical moving parts, it uses less than a hundredth the power of a hard disk, and it can be made very small.

FORBES: Magazine Article

The need for local storage has made small storage devices one of the fastest growing markets for hard disk drives and soon perhaps also for flash memory.

FORBES: Making Connections at the 2012 CES

That's precisely what I paid in 1985 for my first Macintosh, with its small black-and-white screen, 512 kilobytes of memory and no hard disk.

FORBES: Magazine Article