Maxtor Corporation, Delaware ( hard disk drive manafacturer )

Beautifully engraved SPECIMEN certificate from the Maxtor Corporation . This historic document was printed by the Thomas De La Rue Bank Note Company in 1993 and has a block border. This item has the printed signatures of the Company's President ( L.R. Hootnuf ) and Secretary.

Maxtor Corporation is one of the world's largest suppliers of hard disk drive products. Offering one of the most expansive lines of storage products to store your digital world, Maxtor products are found in homes, at work and in large enterprise businesses. Maxtor has a reputation as a proven market leader built by consistently providing high-quality products and service and support for its customers. Maxtor can be found online at www.maxtor.com. The company is traded on the NYSE under the MXO symbol.

Maxtor's products serve three market segments - Client Computing, Digital Entertainment and Enterprise Computing. Each segment provides hard disk drive products specific to that market's need.

Client Computing -- PCs, desktop RAID and workstations (DiamondMax® and Fireball®), and personal storage solutions (Maxtor OneTouch™), retail disk drives and accessories. Digital Entertainment -- storage solutions for consumer electronics and digital entertainment. This includes Maxtor® QuickView® consumer electronics (CE) hard disk drives designed specifically for PVRs, DVRs, STBs and game consoles. Enterprise Computing -- high-performance hard disk drives for Intel-based enterprise servers (Atlas®), and high-capacity ATA hard disk drives for nearline and midline enterprise storage applications (MaXLine™). Maxtor distributes hard disk drive products through its OEM relationships including Dell, DirecTV, Echostar, Apple, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, JVC, Legend, TiVo, ReplayTV, Philips, Thompson Multimedia and others. Maxtor's line of products is also made available through its global distribution channels including Bell Microproducts, Ingram Micro, Tech Data, Best Buy, CompUSA, Costco and Staples.

Founded in 1982, Maxtor has an experienced and visionary executive team that enables the company to become one of the most respected in the industry. To meet the growing global demand for its products, Maxtor manufactures its ATA and 15,000 RPM SCSI hard drives in its own cell-based manufacturing facility in Singapore and its 10,000 RPM SCSI drives through a relationship with Japan-based Matsushita-Kotobuki Electronics (MKE). In 2003, Maxtor announced that it is building a new manufacturing facility in Suzhou, China, which will also manufacture desktop hard drives. The facility is expected to be completed in 2004.

In April 2001, Maxtor acquired Quantum HDD to create one of the largest hard disk drive companies in the world. In September 2001, Maxtor acquired MMC Technology, Inc., allowing the company to vertically integrate and manufacture media used in its hard disk drives. These strategic acquisitions give Maxtor the agility and global resources necessary to provide a full line of consumer, personal and enterprise storage solutions.

Maxtor had fiscal year 2003 revenues of $4.1 billion. Maxtor is headquartered in Milpitas, California with product development operations in Longmont, Colorado and Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. The company also has numerous sales and service facilities located throughout the world. Maxtor employs a worldwide workforce of approximately 13,500.

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About Specimens

Specimen Certificates are actual certificates that have never been issued. They were usually kept by the printers in their permanent archives as their only example of a particular certificate. Sometimes you will see a hand stamp on the certificate that says "Do not remove from file".

Specimens were also used to show prospective clients different types of certificate designs that were available. Specimen certificates are usually much scarcer than issued certificates. In fact, many times they are the only way to get a certificate for a particular company because the issued certificates were redeemed and destroyed. In a few instances, Specimen certificates were made for a company but were never used because a different design was chosen by the company.

These certificates are normally stamped "Specimen" or they have small holes spelling the word specimen. Most of the time they don't have a serial number, or they have a serial number of 00000. This is an exciting sector of the hobby that has grown in popularity over the past several years.