StorageNetworks wanted companies to plug into data storage the way they plugged into the electric grid. It said it was the first company to offer storage purely as a service. Two years after it started work in October 1998, it ran 37 data centers in 11 American cities and one in London. Its timing was the edge of the dot-com crash, and its pitch was close to what the cloud sells today.

An EMC Salesman's Idea

Peter Bell spent nearly ten years selling storage at EMC before he co-founded StorageNetworks with William Miller in 1998. The company opened its first storage data center in Houston in May 1999. It kept customers' main data, backed it up to tape, and copied it to remote sites in case of disaster. Its customers ran banks, phone companies, retailers and fast-growing web businesses. The bet was that storage would grow so fast that companies would rather rent it.

Cash in the Bank, Then Goodbye

StorageNetworks priced at $27 a share on June 30, 2000, and listed on Nasdaq as STOR. Within months the dot-com crash hit its web customers, and big companies cut their spending. In 2003 the board weighed a sale, acquisitions and going it alone, and chose none of them. Shareholders voted that October on a plan to dissolve the company. With about $201 million in cash, StorageNetworks expected to pay out roughly $1.60 to $1.70 a share.

Cover: Radcliffe Library, Oxford, William Henry Fox Talbot. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a great library (stored knowledge).