|
Home
Origins
of the Floppy Drive
Woz's
Floppy Drive Miracle
Lisa,
the Apple III, and the Twiggy Fiasco
Mass
storage and the Macintosh Project
A
Floppy for Macintosh
Manual
vs. Auto Eject: The Great Floppy Debate
iMac
and the End of an Era
Sources
|
A
Floppy for Macintosh
 VS. 
With Twiggy on the
verge of meltdown, the Macintosh team needed to find a floppy drive for
the Mac. Fast. Since management had already committed to the 1984
ad campaign, the Macintosh had to be completed by the start of the
year. Steve Jobs met with a number of Japanese drive manufacturers to
find a replacement and chose an 5.25-inch Alps prototype over a 3.5-inch
Sony design, against the recommendation of Dave Vaughan, who was responsible
for the manufacturing of the Mac.
Bob Belleville, engineering manager of the Macintosh group, secretly brought
Hidetoshi Komoto, the inventor of the Sony design, to Apple while Alps
floundered in its attempts to produce a working drive. As Michael Malone
describes in Infinite Loop:
"For the next week, Bandley 6 resembled a French farce, with Komoto
whisked away into a far cubicle whenever Jobs appeared, and then dragged
out for hurried meetings whenever Jobs was gone. Komoto for his part
never seemed to have understood why he was regularly yanked into corners."
(Malone, p. 315)
|
|
With the 1984
deadline approaching and no Alps drives in sight, Belleville revealed
the Sony alternative, making possible the Mac's release in January
1984. The hard-shelled 3.5-inch disks became the standard for the
Macintosh and (in later, higher-capacity incarnations) for the entire
PC industry. In January 1986, the Mac Plus was released with an
800 kb 3.5-inch floppy drive; in September 1988, the Mac IIx shipped
with a built-in SuperDrive capable of using 1.44 MB high-density
floppy disks.
|
|
