Buffalo Technology was founded in 1975 by Makoto Maki and was first started as a family business called Melco. Buffalo was originally founded as an audio equipment manufacturer  in 1981. Buffalo now mostly manufactures RAM products, flash memory CD-ROM/DVD-RW drives, hard disks, and other computer components including CPU accelerators. Buffalo currently have a work force of 824 staff with a total revenue of US$1.5 billion. Buffalo's main competitors are: Seagate, Western Digital, Iomega, LaCie and Fabrik.