You're right, your anecdote about almost meeting SJ, the polite person who looked you in the eye to say "excude me," is a much more meaningful glimpse into his character than reading about a couple of dozen fanboy encounters. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks also for your kudos for the rug-rat's efforts, I'll be sure to pass the whole story along.

Cosmo, I can't wait to see detailed pics of the ribbon cable hack on that MoBo. Yours is a much more electrically correct implementation than the one in the other picture with the 28 pin ribbon cable PCB conversion to 50 pin ribbon. There's not a 150mm section of crosstalk highway on yours. It looks as if all the proper lines (all the same length) are connected to the SCSI chipset's outbound legs.

The ground line looks like it's probably soldered to the connector shell lug. The rest of the alternate ground lines would be tied together at the tie all the HDD's inline connector's PCB pad level. I've always wondered if that's what Apple counted on when the chose that awful, SCSI spec non-compliant, DB-25 connector for the Mac.

Pics of your MoBo will make SSD conversions a snap other "Silent Mac" Hackers.

Was there a pair of SIP internal terminator blocks or a set of discrete resistors that were removed? Putting headers into those thru-holes would be the only way to make the hack more elegant that I can think of offhand.