I have been saving this brittle, yellow, tractor feed sheet of paper for a very long time. It was printed with a dot matrix printer back when dot matrix ruled the land. I saved it because it was a shining example of the writing quality we used to have during the time of RelayNet, FidoNet and Echomail. I’m posting it now so it might one day be picked up by the Internet Archive project and preserved for all time. Sadly the harddisk conference (hdconf) doesn’t appear to go back to 1990.
I am keying in only the story portion of this post
From: Robert Falbo
Subject: ST-4096 Problems
Number: 1740
Date: 12-01-90 (17:47)
In the beginning, there was darness, and the knashing of teeth, and 8” floppies ruled the land. And Al shugart looked out over the Land, and saw that it was bad. And Al begot Shugart Associates to lead the people out of the 8” darkness to the land of 5 1/4” floppies, and he did prosper. And his floppy drives spread the length and breadth of the Land, and he saw that it was good. But time marches on…and so it came to pass that Al was not satisfied with floppy storage, but yearned for a faster, bigger means of storage… the holy hard drive! And it so came to pass that Al and his Associates sold their business and formed another in search of the holy hard drive…and Seagate was it’s name. And Seagate did bequith the ST506 full-height hard drive, and Al did hold it up before the masses, and they were taken by it’s brilliance. And ST506 hard drives did litter the landscape, and Al saw that it was good. But deep inside, the flame of innovation still burned. And from this flame came the idea of a still larger drive, with an improved interface (well, only slightly), and two (count ’em!) rigid platters supporting a magnificent 10 formatted megabytes. And Seagate did produce this drive, and All who saw it pronounced it to be the standard by which other drives were to be measured. And Al saw that ti was good. Now while this was happening, the Dark Empire of Armonk (& Boca Raton) watched from afar, and understood some of the ramifications, and so decided to offer this hard drive with their new Computer. And so they did. And thus became the ST506/412 Interface, as told to me by an old Sage.
(With appologies to just about anybody concerned, including you, Al!)
I did leave off the last little bit which took a poke at someone’s age, otherwise, unless I made some typos, this is as it was posted though I needed to squint hard at the paper. A friend of mine ran Scintillation BBS and that is where I obtained my feed.
