This is splorp.

ISSN 1496-3221

August 20, 2003

Hippy dippy hard disk drivers.

In my ongoing (and somewhat laughable, according to my wife) attempt to catalogue every single, freaking piece of hardware and software I’ve managed to collect over the past twenty years, I occasionally stumble across some simply glorious nuggets. This evening, I verified ownership of several floppies worth of classic driver and utility software from the sophomore years of Macintosh SCSI peripheral development. Anyone remember the LoDown CD drive, the first that ever shipped for the Mac? Got it. How about the TapeCrate tape backup device from Crate Systems? Got it. Ever noodle with the various utilities for a Novy Systems Mac Plus accelerator card? In spades. Surely some of you used a ThunderScan, right? Two versions of the hardware and software straight out of 1984, baby. Now, where’d I pack away that old ImageWriter? But back to the original subject of this post… one of the disks in my hot little hand is for an original Jasmine 20 MB hard drive.Jasmine hard disk driver. Circa 1987.The fact that I still have this software in my possession is a side-affect of my compulsion, and not necessarily hippy or dippy in any way. The aforementioned hippy dippiness presents itself in the form of the strangely poetic slogan found on the obverse side of the disk label — and I quote: “The flowers of yesterday, the fruit of today, and the seeds of tomorrow are one.” Finding any connection between this text and second generation Macintosh storage technology is a bit of a stretch — even for me. What on earth were they smoking at Jasmine Technologies back then? In retrospect, it might explain their unfortunate demise via Chapter 11 proceedings in the early nineties.

This item was posted by Grant Hutchinson.

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