SimpleTech's most prized idea was a way to stack memory chips on top of each other. Its patented IC Tower packed several chips into the footprint of one, a trick that mattered in crowded servers and routers. The Santa Ana company, run by the Moshayedi brothers, sold more than 2,500 memory, storage and connectivity products when it filed in 2000. Its CompactFlash cards went into early digital cameras and handhelds.

Brothers in Orange County

Manouch and Mike Moshayedi co-founded Simple Technology in California in March 1990. The company bought standard memory chips and built them into modules and cards, some custom-made for equipment makers in networking, telecom and industrial gear. Memory was a brutal, cyclical business, where prices could halve in months. SimpleTech's edge was engineering: denser modules, stacked chips and rugged flash storage that bigger, cheaper rivals did not bother to make.

From Flash Cards to SSDs

SimpleTech priced its offering at $11 a share in September 2000 and listed on Nasdaq under STEC, just as the tech market turned down. Years later it sold its consumer products line, renamed itself STEC, and bet on solid-state drives for enterprise storage systems. Its ZeusIOPS drives sold well to large storage makers for a time. Competition grew fierce, and in 2013 Western Digital bought STEC for about $340 million in cash.

Cover: The Pagoda at Zojo Temple and Akabane, Utagawa Hiroshige. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a tiered pagoda (stacked memory chips).