EMC Buys 90s High Flyer Iomega For $213 Million

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Storage giant EMC is buying Iomega for $213 million in cash, a slight premium above its $200 million market cap at the close of trading today. Iomega, which makes portable hard drives and Zip drives, will become the core of EMC’s consumer and small business storage device business. During the 1990s, Iomega was one of the original tech momentum stocks, trading as high as $114. Today, it closed at $3.64.

The hardware game just ain’t what it used to be.

Perhaps EMC could combine Iomega with Mozy, an online storage service it bought last year for $76 million. The trend in consumer storage, as with consumer software, is to offer both online and offline capabilities.