Control Data Corporation was a leader in disc drive development and manufacture. The primary market strategy was to offer products comparable to those of IBM, but at much lower prices.

Phil Arneson, previously a design engineer on the disc drive development team, was responsible for marketing, planning, and business management. He conceived and led a new strategy, to develop a family of disc drive products which would be totally differentiated from IBM. The strategy was risky, inasmuch as no other major supplier had dared to take this approach.

Arneson's business plan called for a startup investment of over $4 million to introduce a family of products to be known as "Storage Module Disc Drives (SMD)."

The SMD product line turned out to be the most successful product in the history of the OEM disc drive marketplace, generating over $3 billion in revenues, enabling Control Data to achieve a market share in excess of 70%.

Please refer to the SMD article.