So, I do apologize for coming down a bit hard. I guess I was just sort of losing a little patience with seeing the various definitions of "things" go flying past each other even after they'd been stated multiple times.
To be clear: There just might be some interesting stories about the inner workings of MMI as a company, and if you can find someone who remembers where the bodies were buried they may well have some great anecdotes to share. (Well into the 80's the bar for entering the hardware industry was low enough that all it took was one or two motivated entrepreneurs/con men to set up a computer company, much like how the dot-com industry is now. And a lot of those people were brilliant, crazy, crooked, just plain incompetent... all of which can be good for a laugh or a tear in the end.) By all means keep looking for them, if you care to.
Mostly what I was concerned about here was the implication that the hard drive used in "any" GCC Hyperdrive was some priceless, proprietary, and completely irreplaceable relic turned out by a dead company no one remembers, because the obvious thing that follows is that if someone *has* a Hyperdrive with a dead mechanism clearly it's garbage and they might as well throw the whole assembly in the trash. It's worth clarifying that the Hyperdrive actually employs a once-widely-used industry-standard interface, so while MFM hard drives aren't exactly dirt common anymore the device *is* technically repairable using a donor drive from another old machine. (Assuming the software required to low-level format a blank Hyperdrive is still floating around.)
(And of course there was the philosophical discussion of how GCC's use of generic parts contrasts with Apple generally. Mac128 was leading into an interesting discussion using the Mac hard drive interfaces as an example of just how pervasive Apple's "Not Invented Here" attitude was in the first half of the 80's. Unless you went third-party every Apple computer prior to the Mac Plus used storage devices which were specifically tailored to Apple's whims with custom electronics. The HD-20 is a Macintosh example, but there were also the "Profile" and "Widget" hard drives for the Apple II/III and Lisa, and of course their endless tinkering with floppy drives. Pretty much in every case following the Disk ][ this tinkering resulted in a device that was more expensive for the consumer and in some cases arguably inferior to the "generic" option (think: "Twiggy"), so it's interesting to explore exactly what the mindset behind it all was. Were Apple's engineers *really* deluded enough to think they were that much smarter than the rest of the world, or was it all just a cynical ploy to maximize profits and lock-in customers by making everything proprietary? Or some combination of both?
Granted it's an off-topic discussion, but interesting nonetheless.)
Anyway, good luck on your quest.
To be clear: There just might be some interesting stories about the inner workings of MMI as a company, and if you can find someone who remembers where the bodies were buried they may well have some great anecdotes to share. (Well into the 80's the bar for entering the hardware industry was low enough that all it took was one or two motivated entrepreneurs/con men to set up a computer company, much like how the dot-com industry is now. And a lot of those people were brilliant, crazy, crooked, just plain incompetent... all of which can be good for a laugh or a tear in the end.) By all means keep looking for them, if you care to.
Mostly what I was concerned about here was the implication that the hard drive used in "any" GCC Hyperdrive was some priceless, proprietary, and completely irreplaceable relic turned out by a dead company no one remembers, because the obvious thing that follows is that if someone *has* a Hyperdrive with a dead mechanism clearly it's garbage and they might as well throw the whole assembly in the trash. It's worth clarifying that the Hyperdrive actually employs a once-widely-used industry-standard interface, so while MFM hard drives aren't exactly dirt common anymore the device *is* technically repairable using a donor drive from another old machine. (Assuming the software required to low-level format a blank Hyperdrive is still floating around.)
(And of course there was the philosophical discussion of how GCC's use of generic parts contrasts with Apple generally. Mac128 was leading into an interesting discussion using the Mac hard drive interfaces as an example of just how pervasive Apple's "Not Invented Here" attitude was in the first half of the 80's. Unless you went third-party every Apple computer prior to the Mac Plus used storage devices which were specifically tailored to Apple's whims with custom electronics. The HD-20 is a Macintosh example, but there were also the "Profile" and "Widget" hard drives for the Apple II/III and Lisa, and of course their endless tinkering with floppy drives. Pretty much in every case following the Disk ][ this tinkering resulted in a device that was more expensive for the consumer and in some cases arguably inferior to the "generic" option (think: "Twiggy"), so it's interesting to explore exactly what the mindset behind it all was. Were Apple's engineers *really* deluded enough to think they were that much smarter than the rest of the world, or was it all just a cynical ploy to maximize profits and lock-in customers by making everything proprietary? Or some combination of both?
Granted it's an off-topic discussion, but interesting nonetheless.)
Anyway, good luck on your quest.