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Home Forums 68kMLA Questions about early Mac's — #10
Post #10 by Mac128
Source Forum68kMLA
CategoryTroubleshooting
Post DateFri, 22 Feb 2008 - 02:30
Original URLhttps://68kmla.org/bb/threads/questions-about-early-macs.12053/
Post
I think they went to the SuperDrive badge because a lot of people would be confused by the random letters FDHD, which every SE from August 1989 until the SuperDrive printing began has.
The External FDHD has it as well. I'd love to know if they changed that as well.

One has to remember that aside from the PS/2, Apple was one of the only computer makers introducing the new HD format. Despite thorough documentation, it was and still is a troublesome conversion from SD & DD drives to HD. Floppy drives were already known as FDs or FDDs. Adding HD helped get the HD terminology out there, not to mention printing it on the floppy disks themselves. In the end, SuperDrive doesn't really tell the customer anything either, but it is a cool name and a Trademark so valuable that Apple re-used it on the current combo drives, which you recall were called all kinds of goofy things until they became SuperDrives. However, you did know what they were as a result previously being known as "Combo DVD/CD-RW Drives". They may have thought of SuperDrive to begin with and wanted to solidify the change to HD, or they may have changed it later because the FDHD was so much more than just a High Density drive and yes possibly confusing. Either way, telling your PC buddies you have a SuperDrive beats the pants off their HD drive.

Also, Wiki says that the SE FDHD was sold as the SE 1/20 only in Europe. There's no citation, so I don't know how accurate that is, though I do know it exists. Nevertheless it makes sense sense as neither FDHD or SuperDrive may have meant as much across various languages. It also conforms with how they marketed the 512Ke as 512K/800 in Europe.

mp.ls