Update: I apologize for the 'tinny, bassy' audio. I was still learning the ropes with audio when I produced this, and made a bad decision to use my RODE lapel mic rather than a Blue Snowball mic that was giving me endless glitches. I tried boosting bass to fix the sound but made it worse. By the time I clued in after upload, it was too late. I eventually bought a Blue Yeti. I desperately want to redo the audio here but the only option is to delete and reupload, and lose all the views and awesome comments. I really wish RUclips would revisit the options for post-upload editing! Anyway, I promise the newer videos are much better. Yay Yeti! Goofs: 1) I've gotten a fair number of comments about the throwaway joke at the end (are bricks MFM or IDE). :) Yeah I goofed there. At that point I was thinking in terms of how they would have been marketed. It's been a long time but I recall my favorite haunt marketing both 'MFM' and 'IDE' drives based on their physical interface. I may be wrong with regards to Miniscribe.. they may have had an IDE drive by 1987 but it's not clear. But yeah if we are talking about encoding bricks, certainly they would have been RLL. 😀 2) Shugart & Associates and Shugart Technology are two different companies, founded by the same man. Shugart Tech *did* develop the 5.25 ST506/412 drive, but they changed their name rather quickly to Seagate to avoid legal trouble with SA owner Xerox, and they never to my knowledge made any floppy drives. I hope you enjoy this video as much as I enjoyed making it. Close to 50 hours went into it, from research to scripting, recording and 'very special' effects. I think I watched it 50 times, ever mindful of audio issues and video glitches. I think on a technical level it's the best I've produced so far. Which admittedly isn't saying much! I do enjoy documentaries, but boy do they take a long time to produce. Cheers!
It's absolutely hilarious - and of course very well done! Thank you so much for creating such valuable content for us to enjoy for free on this platform! Greatly appreciated!
"Accounting mistakes do happen." A place I worked, somebody moved the decimal point when doing the books and marked down a $10,000 deposit for a $1,000 deposit. When the accountant discovered the $9000 difference between the bank account and the books, the answer was obvious to him. The employees must be stealing.
We are human, mistakes do happen. But it amazes me that we only make companies report in the millions for SEC reports.. Crazy how much $$ could hide / accumulate in these though 🤷🏼♂️
@@michaelwerkov3438 The Horizon scandal. The Post Office and Fujitsu did not come out of that smelling of roses. A lot of Post Office workers were wrongly convicted of having fingers in the till and at least one killed themselves.
About 20 years back I was taking an Ethics class as a part of my undergrad program. When the bankruptcy audit is starting, they tend to bring in specialists on this sort of thing, and they brought in my then Ethics Professor to become the temporary CFO until the whole federal investigation bankruptcy was completed. He was in one of the warehouses when they started opening boxes of bricks. He was a part of getting the company's books cleaned up until all the company assets were finally distributed. The feds used him like this about 4 times. He quit doing those big projects just before Enron blew up. OMG the diagram he drew on the board about Enron was incredible. One of my favorite undergrad classes ever - because of this guy!
Never Trust anything too good to be true be it Stocks, Products, Services, Bonds, Trips etc and only ever invest/spend what you are willing too loose with no form of recourse
When I realized this wasn't stock footage I was confused why the views were so low. Then I saw the size of the channel. You've got a great delivery and put a lot of effort to make the topic really interesting to a layman. I hope 2022 treats you well.
My favorite part was when he started talking about how the books were slanted it's just a shot of him sitting at a table and the whole building is tilted. First the coffee cup goes, then the computer, then finally his chair starts going down the slant. I'll admit I was getting kind of bored at first, then came all of the original footage. He's got a David Zucker like delivery.
7:20 I have such a clear memory of this 1987 Black Monday crash. I was in high school and my economics teacher was teaching us how the stock markets worked. Every student in class was given $10000 to invest and over the weekend we were suppose to select companies to invest out $10000 in. Then on Monday we would turn in our lists. Over the next 2 weeks we would track our investments and in the end whoever earned the most money would get a prize. Well, we looked in the papers the next day and were stunned at what had happened. No one in my class earned any money, we all lost, but there was one kid who lost the least and he won the prize. I came in somewhere in the middle. Thank god the $10000 was just imaginary money. The teacher said over all of his classes we lost a couple of million bucks. I kind of decided that the stock market wasn't for me. What a nightmare!
That crash was the first time I heard my parents use the term 'recession'. That really freaked me out because I didn't understand the difference between that and Depression, and I knew the latter was bad.
@erictaylor5462 If you had invested in the stock market since the time you finished school until now you'd probably be a millionaire. It's never too late , especially in certain tech companies like Amazon , Apple , IBM, Google and microsoft over that time period.
I bought stock on Tuesday. I tell young people to expect several market crashes over their lifetimes. The people who do the best are those that do not panic.
@@jamesodell3064 the people who do not panic are the people who have millions upon millions already stored in assets and not liquidity so that they can sweat out the market lows while everyone else is busy jumping from their windows. serious question: do you think *anything* other than flat-out luck and already having money is necessary to make money on the stock market? because if so, you’re an idiot.
I remember back in the 80s I stopped by Tandon computers in Moorpark CA to pick up my new computer, and they had recently received pallets of bricks instead of hard drives! So yes, they did ship those bricks!! I never thought I would hear that story again. Thanks for this video!
I worked at Sun Microsystems in the 90's and there was an engineer on my team who worked at Miniscribe. I remember him telling us this story, we couldn't believe it. Thanks for getting all the rest of the details!
I was an employee of Miniscribe Hong Kong in 1988. We heard a lot of stories when Miniscribe went into Chapter 11. One of the story is they were shipping bricks to customer rather than the real hard drives. We thought it was a silly joke but turned out it was true. Then it was acquired by Maxtor and I stayed there until they moved the factory to China.
@@JohnZombi88 Pretty much, that's why I never took it. I'm currently at my Computer Science degree. fuckhandles957 got it right. Hong Kong was, and should be, separate from PRCChina.
And to this day Maxtor keeps shipping bricks, keeping the tradition alive . . . (Can you tell that I am not a fan of Maxtor HDDs? My brother had a Maxtor drive where the plates literally melted into ovals rather than circles. Yes, he opened them up to show me.)
I worked at Zenith Data Systems during this era. It was the "Wild West" of computer manufacturing back then. What a time. Edit: And the brick in the box happened elsewhere. We had a couple of people fired at my facility because they (being in the shipping dept.) were placing rocks and bricks in new computer boxes and smuggling the computers out of the plant for black market sales.
As part of a complicated real estate deal with a German investor, the bricks were traded overseas for wool, grain, lumber and ore. It fell through because it turned out the island was entirely fictitious.
Was a 20 something engineer working for a supplier to Miniscribe during that era... visited that Longmont CO facility often. Interesting times. It was really not a secret by those close to Miniscribe that shady things were going on. Anything related to the PC business at that time was truly the "wild west". I actually went to work at the Longmont facility a few years later after it had been purchased and taken over by Maxtor... probably one of the most toxic environments I ever worked in.
@@Sauceyjames Yeah, There's like 12 breweries in the city with a couple of them being decently sized like Oskar Blues (Dales Pale Ale) and Left Hand brewing. Lots of breweries in general in Colorado. I remember that IBM and Maxtor had offices in Longmont but looking it up it says that Intel, Seagate, Western Digital, Texas Instruments have offices there and more. When I was living there in 2017 the economy seemed really good and It's not too far from Boulder which IMO is a really fun party town, definitely better than Denver.
Colorado really seemed to be a hotspot for the early days of Personal Computers. In Colorado Springs there are endless buildings you can trace back to HP, DEC, various floppy disk manufacturers, semiconductor companies, and tons more I'm forgetting.
They got caught when the bricks were returned. The warehouse staff was not in on it, the bricks were processed as returned new inventory, then they were shipped out to a customer. The customer received them (a distributer in Boulder IIRC), the owner went down to his loading dock to get one to upgrade his own computer, and discovered it was a brick. He figured it was someone on his warehouse staff until he checked more boxes and found the whole pallet was bricks. It is my understanding that they were dumped in a field east of Longmont. At this point the game collapsed. The mantra under Wiles was "make the numbers", those of us who understood what was going on knew it was really "make up the numbers". Anyway, it seems that our management was not even competent as crooks.
Interesting. US v Wiles made no mention of that. They detailed literally everything else about the case.. all the meetings, etc. But their final word was simply that the company began to collapse when basic bills couldn't be paid.
Since the "bricks" were in a separate isolated warehouse with no staff, and the transactions were ALL on paper, there was no bricks moving out, let alone being returned. So, this "Distributor in Boulder" story reeks of Urban Myth (or BS, if we all be honest).
@@johncoops6897 Not quite, they got greedy. The bricks were initially shipped out and booked as revenue. This is where the semi tractor-trailers came in; it was temporary storage. After the quarter was booked they returned them to Longmont, and recorded the value as returned goods without subtracting from the previous quarters revenue. Their error was in not intercepting the returned goods, and they were sold again, this time to a real customer. Believe what you wish; I was standing behind the drunken CFO as he explained it to a friend at the company Christmas party. He also said that Wiles had ordered him to burn the books. He noted that he had kept a copy so he could turn evidence. And, as an aside, why would the bricks have existed if the transactions only existed on paper? They made a show of having the "material" move around.
@@johnanon6938 Not sure there was ever a reason for additional lawsuits, once the problem was discovered the material was replaced. Most of the employees were honest.
I bought a 40 meg MiniScribe at the Software House in Dallas in 1988. I think I paid $300 for it. I installed it in my XT clone, my brother, who is an Electrical Engineer that helped me build my XT clone 6 months prior, told me that they use MiniScribe's as door stops at their office since they have a reputation of crashing. I told him it was the best $300 dollars I spent. 6 months later it died. Now I know the rest of the story...Paul Harvey...Good Day....!
Yeah I don't remember having much luck with them either. I ended up sticking with Conner during those years. The old machines I have that have them seem to be having this issue where the spindle locks up.. some kinda weird magnetic thing. I can manually 'hand crank' them but inevitably they seize up again when turned off.
@@the_kombinator I remember in 1992, buying a 50MB Quantum IDE drive at Radio Shack, it was $500. I think that my first Seagate RLL 30MB with controller card was around $375 in 1987.
Very good summary. I worked for Miniscribe for a year in the 80's and the culture was definitely corrupt. We spent the year and $4M building a robotic assembly line for a drive that was obsolete before we finished.
I have touched the big drive at 1:41. It was the first "successful" working hard disk. Arms were pneumatically controlled. The motor looked used and like something out of a washing machine. It was at IBM's San Jose office and when they downsized they planned to junk it (as they had most of their other "museums"). Last I heard, someone convinced them to save it, if for nothing else to donate to the Smithsonian.
@@russellstyles5381 Yep true. And honestly, I don't want them to exist in first place... And if unopened NOS is found, I actually wonder if anyone knows whether there is a brick or hdd inside :D Well sure it could xrayed.
I worked at a small software company in 1983-84, with about 3 or 4 other programmers. The floppy disks were 5 1/4", and really were floppy. Only one of us had a hard drive (5 MB), and he was responsible for keeping all the software builds. (It was an external drive, in a fairly large box. I also remember seeing a secret pre-release Mac on the desk of one of the company's owners. I pushed a key on the keyboard out of curiosity, and crashed it. :)
This was excellent! Well researched, well presented, and just an optimal length! Thank-you for continuing to produce such high quality content. Ironically, I was in Business School when Miniscribe finally fell apart, yet there was no discussion in any of my classes about the fraud or (more importantly) the management culture that lead to it.
Many thanks. In my research for this video I did find a few current business courses where the Miniscribe mess is a case study. I think because they were a relatively young hard drive maker, at a time when home computers were still a new thing, they just didn't get as much attention.
I worked at Maxtor in Longmont, CO a few years after this happened. I started, in '93, as an assembler on the pilot production line. There were still a bunch of people, engineers and techs, there that had worked at Miniscribe and man did I hear stories. Met some of the material handlers that had worked at Miniscribe and heard stories from them about what they were hauling around, lol. I know one of the failure analysis techs on the production line had one of the boxed bricks as a memento.
I was hired in the spring of 1981 as a janitor at Miniscribe. I was approximately employee #105. Such heady times. I'm thinking by the beginning of 1983, there were 1500 people in 3 buildings. I was promoted to facilities and we would move into empty buildings and build cleanrooms and offices for production. I was convinced(long story) to apply to a Facility Managers job and worked for 6 months in my new job and was laid off right after New Years day of 1983. There were about 19 layoffs in that span that I avoided until then. I was rehired to fitup another building and was laidoff in late 1983. I'm thinking in the summer of 1982, Miniscribe went public and word on the street was that it created 8 millionaires that day. Of course I heard about the rocks and was glad I wasn't around.
A cabal of executives and managerials embezzling the company. Big salaries, fat bonuses, great lifestyle. They should've all been audited, retroactively fined and punished if they'd had any involvement, if they'd accepted any bribes and payments from stolen money. Instead, "justice" was served by sacrificing the intended scapegoats.
check out fraud happening to this day. between chase and a female running off with millions, the top of the gov and family there of. absolute power corrupts absolutely. of course conspiracies such as this video is cheap tricks to the people at the top these days. ooooooo the big c word, conspiracy. all it means is 2 or more people taking part in a crime, nothing fringe about that people, thanks the social engineering post JFK death. next - AI committing conspiracy, a wave of processing power and potential
FACT : There is no current SSD rated for Achival backups ( Long Term) due to loss of data over time. It's either Tape or spinning drives backups for extended long term storage. SSD backup drives need to be powered up once in a while to do any error data corrections, garbage collection, trim the Cells. This is what was happening earlier to Samsung SDD’s data leaking over time when unpowered for long periods of time.
@@678rwhpFor those curious: what this meant is that you can remove the drive from the computer, hide it in a box, and after a long time the data would still be there when you reconnect it. Flash storage don't have that kinda feature, but it shouldn't really matter to an average gamer. So you could say that SSD's are somewhat less volatile than RAM lmao
If I'm not mistaken, IDE was high-end back then (first produced in 1987), so those bricks would have been MFM or maybe RLL, which premiered in 1979. Many 3.5" 20-megabyte HDDS of that time were RLL, because that was the most efficient mix of magnetic media quality, number of disks inside the drive (and therefore number of components), and electronic complexity. So the final comment of the entire video looks a bit half-assed ;) (My parents had a Miniscribe HDD back then, and it was decent. It lost a sector every once in a while, but nothing that Norton's Disk Tester couldn't fix. There was usually no loss of data, just some funny noises followed by an error message or a sudden program crash.
@@achtsekundenfurz7876 back then, Miniscribe did IDE drives nearly exclusively and exclusively toward the end. They started with stepper motor models, which I used a fair number of, then they switched to voice coil models, then to bricks. Losing sectors was a sign of losing the plating on the platter on some drives, that'd increase more and more until the drive entirely failed. That was in the early voice coil models. Earlier stepper motor models would gradually lose a sector or two over longer time frames, mapping the dead sector out from the bad sector list (voice coil drives did too and still do) until they run out of spare sectors. Either way, start seeing losses, plan for replacement soon...
"Brick your hard drive." Funny. I was working for a company that supplied Miniscribe with the hard disks for their drives when this went down. They had been pressuring us to send more and more disks to meet their "demand", which we did. First we heard was when they said they were returning the disks and for us to pick up tens of thousands of disks from their loading dock. That returned product blew a hole in our balance sheets as well. Years later I wound up working for Maxtor in SJ and traveled to the Longmont facility where the ghosts from Miniscribe still lingered. No bricks lying around though, I asked.
Loved this. I was at Hewlett-Packard those years, and knew senior execs and investors in all these disk drive companies, but never knew the whole story of MiniScribe. The lesson for younger people - it’s a good thing we have FTC and SEC oversight of all traded companies!
I was vaguely aware of this story since I was a tech support engineer at Sequent Computer Systems where I started working in 1982. Sequent had a similar, but far less damaging, scandal a couple of decades later when it was found to have "shipped" computers to customers that technically left the loading dock but weren't actually in a state to be delivered to the customer. The "shipments" were then returned to the manufacturing facility after the end-of-quarter sales numbers were booked (and were never seen by a customer). Whereupon the builds were actually completed and a real shipment happened a few weeks later. The necessity to meet quarter year targets mandated by Wall Street has caused many company executives to be "creative".
Ah, vulture capitalists. Not the first nor the last company they'll ruin. Miniscribe would've likely fallen apart without their help but it would've been sooner and less dramatically, and so we probably wouldn't have the brick story to tell. Miniscribe's legacy of quality lived on at Maxtor for years, which is one of the many reasons I never trusted those drives either.
"Good inventory and the integrity of honest reporting are the mortar that holds this company together...now hit the bricks, there's more money to be made!" - Someone at MiniScribe...probably.
I worked for a small computer store and we picked up a new source for hard drives. Yup, you guessed it; Miniscribe. They were our loudest hard drive, but we thought they were cool. 20 MB drives that cost less than Seagate, who had gone through their own scandal. Not many had heard of it though. The son of one of their chief engineers shopped in my store and i got to know him. One day he told me his father had quit. Seagate wasn't honest and he didn't agree with what they were doing. There was a known bug in the firmware for one of their discs that caused them to go bad after a year to 18 months of use. Seagate decided not to fix it because the drives were going to be out of warranty and people would buy new drives, making Seagate wealthier. The store stopped buying that model of drive, which was Seagate's most popular drive. Back to Miniscribe: one order we got included bad drives. They clunked and rattled. Every single one in the shipment. We stopped ordering because they lied to us about the drives. They told us it was clear we had dropped the shipping container. We hadn't. The shipper said there wasn't any record of anything in their trucks getting dropped. Something was fishy. Then we heard about the bricks. Real bricks...
That's awesome and sad at the same time. :) I do feel for the honest employees who got caught in the middle, and all the mom and pop investors who got burned when Miniscribe went down. I didn't know about that bug with Seagate. I do remember them having all kinds of issues later on with firmware bugs in their 1tb desktop drives.
I was ordering and installing Miniscribe drives back in the day, and realized something squirrelly was going on at the end. I also heard that people had ordered drives and received bricks. That might have been after the end, and maybe just myth.
highly likely it did happen, or that Miniscribe weren't the only ones to pull that stunt. There have been multiple stories about people receiving bricks instead of harddrives and it must have originated somewhere
When I worked for Seagate at that time, we heard that bricks where ADDED to the boxes to make the accounting think more were being shipped, because the packages would weigh more. Nice to finally get the full story.
I remember this happening. IIRC, it really came to a head when the bricks got delivered. The fertilizer really hit the air movement device at that point.
It's crazy to see how far we've come with hard drives, and storage in general. I pulled an old 380G HDD out of a PC over the weekend and didn't even bother to put it back because it added so little storage as a second drive. Even growing up all I had was floppies with a handful of MBs of storage. Crazy
Oh boi... my first hdd was something like 22MB (paired with an 80286 cpu and 1MB ram, and of course a Hercules card), "shortly" I swapped it with a 210MB one. (edit: ahah now I remember: it was a pain to set up it correctly /type 47 "thingy" in the bios :D /) I work for a small-ish webhosting company and we are responsible for ~30TB of data (as of today). And it's not even "that" much... The most amazing thing is that you used to be able to take one or two boxes of floppies with you, and they were barely more than 10-20MB. Now you can easily have 512GB in your pocket. Anytime. Anywhere.
1981 - DEC PDP11/23 with 8" / 1.2MB DS floppy disk drive, (I believe capacity was approx 0.5MB per side). The step up to a small hard drive, as in 5? MB, was something like an addition $15k. A single HD disk/ platter, certified error free and maybe 11" diameter (?) , were thousands of dollars each. One 8" floppy could store one month's data of 16 component analysis hourly average along with about 10 or 12 other hourly averages, were used for online optimization. Our version of big data/ OLPARS. ☺
First (second-hand) PC I had was a 386SX20 with a 20MB hard drive - this thing actually had a lever sticking out of the side of it that rotated as the heads moved. It was a 'full-height' drive i.e.twice the height of a more modern drive, so almost the size of a brick.
Well, one of the founders of Miniscribe went on to found Conner, which were marginally better drives. I can still hear my 1991 Compaq Deskpro 386/20e's 42 Mb Conner hard disk startup sound - it was long to spin up and noisy, and the performance was about as good as a 386 in 1995.... crap.
Amiga external HDDs had Conner Peripherals 2.5" SCSI HDDs inside. I have one for my Amiga 500 and it still works. (must have around six years of daily use)
This was an amazing video dude. I chuckled the whole way through. As a present day 30 year old it's hysterical looking at the lengths 80s businessmen went to for an attempt at looking legitimately successful. The kind of fraud I'm used to seeing usually just involves fake internet fame. People who pay for views or likes just to get that image of success. But, much like a house of miniscribe bricks, the facade falls to reveal the fraud and it's never not funny to watch someone's dishonesty blow up in their face. This video got a subscription outta me dude 👍 Best of luck with your RUclips journey if you so choose to take that route.
I have direct knowledge of this whole sordid event. I worked with and knew the CEO and the CFO personally. The driver of all of the malfeasance was the unwillingness to take the hit to the stock price that reporting the failure to write down obsolete inventory that had in fact been scrapped. This was a carryover from the previous management team.
@@vernmeyerotto255 Yep. And back in the 80s, people perpetrating white color crimes were notoriously known for getting easy sentences which included house arrest, a few months stay at club Fed complete with Tennis court, etc. -- You would have to REALLY fuck up to get a serious sentence. Plus a lot of people actually got away with this shit depending on how egregious the crime. Many would take a plea deal that basically landed them a slap on the wrist for the promise never to do it again. They might get a few years sentence and then end up only serving a few months due to this and that. Things have changed a bit since then -- but the 80s were well known for the decade of financial decadence and debauchery committed by many who thought they were smarter than uncle Sam.
Fascinating. It's amazing they thought they could get away with the fraud by committing more fraud. It's the same mindset of the gambler who loss chases: if you get into debt, borrow more money and gamble that too.
So honestly, I want to say what a joy it was to hear and see the story of Miniscribe. The details and playful visuals really made my day. I know this must have taken oodles of time but damn it was worth it. Thanks for adding such richness to the history of tech for future generations to enjoy.
Just found your channel today, as a guy in his mid 30’s I can remember a Tandy from RadioShack being the first computer I ever used which led to a lifelong interest in computers and eventually a degree in computer sciences. Amazing channel! Keep up the great work!
This is a story worth telling. Evocative of Enron and Theranos, etc. The difference being that Miniscribe apparently actually made something, and had assets of value.
At the time Miniscribe was lampooned as "minibrick".. Some drives were iffy. I had three 3650's fail in a week, but then I've seen the 6085 last 20 years and still kickin'. In my opinion, Mini scribe was no worse than any vendor that was not "Seagate". The only significant difference was seek-time, which was for Miniscribe limited by a stepper motor, approximately 40ms. Late models reached 28ms. At that point there was no way to compete without a different technology for stepping. The industry settled on an analog seeking method based on the sniffing' of pre-recorded data to reference user-written data. Wedge-servo gave way to embedded servo. There's a lot going on here.
The 3053 had a 28ms seek time, it was the voice coil type. Five data heads, the sixth head was the servo track. I had one for probably four or five years, but eventually 40 meg wasn’t enough. It was still working fine until I replaced it with a much larger IDE drive.
@@dale116dot7 That was a very late Miniscribe model. I didn't know they'd gone voice-coil. You mention the sixth head, which is a wonder to me as it is only me who asked that question. Why configure FIVE heads when five means that there are at least three platters, and thus six surfaces. The ST4096 was the one that made me ask the question, waaaay long time ago. Servo data is pre-recorded on one face of a platter (head 0), and that information cannot be altered by any user-initiated process. The actuator is a voice-coil, which is a tuned device similar in concept to the coil that drives a speaker cone. The controller will throw the head out with a pre-determined force, and then sniff along the servo, tuning the seek to perfection. It is an active process requiring a much smarter onboard set of electronics than the previous, stepper motor actuator. With a stepper actuator there is no servo and thus no 'wasted' storage, which in the case of the ST4096 is 10%, in the ST251 it is 20%.... In order to get increased seek speeds, the total possible storage of a drive was limited by one whole surface and head). Later drives used a system called "Wedge-servo", where the servo information was prerecorded on a surface or surfaces, but did not exclude the use of that same surface for user-data. Again, a lot smarter electronics were required, but the space the servo took up was significantly reduced and storage space gained.
@@Technoid_Mutant The BIOS setup was five heads, the sixth head was for servo which couldn’t be used for data as you describe above. The electronics board was pretty full, all through hole parts. I don’t know that I’d ever seen a through hole PCB as full as that one.
The 8051 had embedded servo, and had the 28 mSec seek time. The other voice coil drives (all 5 1/4 inch) used a dedicated servo surface. Everything else was a rack and pinion stepper motor. The 8051 is notable as it and the new 7000 series (1" high drive based on the 8051) were the only products that survived the transition to Maxtor. We never did a wedge servo, that was a Quantum patent.
And Seagate isn't free of fault themselves. The infamous ST3000DM001 with it's high failure rate that lead to a class action. I had one and it did fine, running more than 50k hours over 8 years. Or the old IBM 60GXP and 75GXP Deathstars.
Honestly, yeah, why didn’t they fill those boxes with electronic waste and torch the lot? An insurance payout would have squared the books nicely. If Management can’t be creative, what good is it?
I subscribed immediately and consider myself fortunate that I found your channel. This is excellent reporting on a fascinating subject! Thank you for having such a good narrator who is a live person! It's about two orders of magnitude better than a droning machine. I was a programmer building my own systems during this time, so I kind of lived it, but this fills in so much that I wasn't aware of at the time. All good wishes.
Imagine those people who hoards new old stock hardware, unboxing a new miniscibe mfm drive only to find a vacuum sealed brick. Then realising they have another 100 of them.
Nicely done. Man, I'd love to get a hold of one of those boxed bricks. It'd go great next to the mug I got from a college friend, who's first job out of school was with an energy firm in Houston named 'Enron.'
Interesting story. In 1987 I worked in Canada's largest reseller of Hard drives and other peripherals, including a metric shit-tonne of Miniscribe. I had never heard this story until today. I wasn't in the shipping department so never had the pleasure of returning bricks.
Wow, nostalgia time. In my very early 20's (which was in the very early 80's) I worked for a peripherals company in Silicon Valley. They had gone public riiiiight before the personal computer bust that happened around that time. I remember the CEO proudly driving a Benz with the company's stock market symbol (CRMK if you want to look it up) on the vanity plate. Not long after I started working there they started pulling the same tricks as described in this video. One difference is that their products had so many problems with defects that they had plenty of actual units sitting around on pallets to toss in the boxes, ship, and have returned immediately (repeat ad nauseum). They were also pulling some kind of tricks where they wouldn't close out a month's sales until a monetary target had been reached. I'd go back to the shipping department 3/4 of the way through June and they would still be frantically shipping fake orders from March. This was to inflate the figures for how much they were shipping. I wound up getting laid off 2 weeks after my 1-year review, which was excellent, but they gave me no raise, saying they couldn't afford it. I think at the time I was making $6 an hour and I was in engineering! To give me even a buck an hour raise would have cost them $40 a week. Obviously, I was PISSED and said so, having stuck with the company for a year at the peanuts wage believing what they had told me about how they were going to reward me at my review. I expressed my disappointment and anger and they begged me to stay. 14 days later, so long, we have to cut staff. So they choose not someone in management making $1000 a week but a guy making $240 a week, probably the lowest paid employee in the place. That's part of the whole financial thing, analysts and lenders look at "number of employees vs. sales" regardless of how much any given employee makes or what they do. That's why it makes better "sense" to lay off the people who actually do the work rather than the ones who sit on their asses and collect fat checks. But that was the 80's for you. Greed greed greed. I do believe it's gotten better in some ways, but still rotten. At one point in my career I swore off ever working for publicly traded companies for this reason. To hell with stock options that go underwater a month after they're issued.
Interesting! I knew Miniscribe got into financial trouble and was eventually bought by/sold to Maxtor, but hadn't heard the full history of it! As luck would have it, I just went through 9x Miniscribe 8438 and 8425 3.5" MFM drives this week. Seven good!
Great telling of this story and the humor makes it even better. However, the opportunity of opportunities was missed for the best hard drive joke of all time. Customer: Hey, you guys shipped me a brick instead of a hard drive! Miniscribe: No we didn't. Customer: Yes, you did. Miniscribe: It's not a brick, it's a block device.
I worked at MiniScribe in 1987 and 1988. Yes, things were booming. The first inkling I had that something was wrong was in early 1988 when one of the material controllers came around to our lab demanding that we relinquish all of the preproduction hard drive cases we used to build up test hard drive assemblies. None of this could be used for production units, so this request seemed off. The 40 MB product line moved from a growth phase to mature product stage that spring, and I moved on to a new 300 MB 2-1/4" project. The project stalled as senior management became involved in the latest company audit, and the temp workers were let go at the end of the 1st quarter. QT had been spending a lot of time in Longmont, and an obscure financial officer, Owen Taranta, began spending a lot of time in our building. I remember seeing management types eyeing the auditors locked boxes - none of this seemed right. About this time, many people were laid off, including myself. I learned later from a friend who lasted longer that an assembly tech he was dating had been working in an old building we called "the cow palace." She had been sworn to secrecy, told she would be "taken care of," and had been assembling product from junk HDA cases (that explained something,) nonfunctional control boards and damaged discs. These junk drives had been shipped to distributors, and allegedly stored behind sheetrock walls until after the end of the quarter to be returned as failed product during the ensuing quarter. These dead drives were called "bricks," starting the legend of "shipping bricks." Since they ran out of junk product fairly quickly, turning to real bricks ensued.
In 1989, I purchased a Packard-Bell PC from Service Merchandise for the 'bargain price' of just $2,000. The unit was equipped with a 40 MB "High Reliability" Miniscribe HD drive. But less than 1 year later, this "high reliability" drive was reporting numerous sector problems almost every time I turned it on, to the point that only a few months later, it had to be replaced. When I went to get a replacement for it, I was wondering why it was so difficult finding another Miniscribe drive. I didn't know the full story until now, the company was actually in bankruptcy at the time. I eventually wound up replacing the entire machine with one that used Western Digital drives instead and have been with them continuously since. Jeez! If I had even the slightest inkling of what was going on, I would have never bought the damn thing in the first place! The brick might have actually worked better!
No idea how I stumbled across this video, but it's always thrilling to find an interesting videomaker, especially one who has a decent back catalog to binge. I'm really loving the visuals/pantomimes you're doing. Keep up the great work!
6:33 I had always assumed the acronym "WTF" had risen to popularity with the rise in popularity of the internet. But here it is on an audit from 1987! xD
Remember when a desktop computer came with a green screen and two 8” floppy discs? There was enough aluminium in the disc drive chassis that it warped the local space/time/gravitational hole. It also gave you a pulled lumbar muscle if you tried to move it on your own!
I have a TRS 80 Model II with the optional 3 8 inch drive expansion unit. I'm terrified of it. You turn it on, all the lights in the house dim. I have nightmares of it trying to eat me.
@@TechTimeTraveller My first job in 1982 the boss had a TRS-80 model II in his office buried in magazines (compile times were long enough to get thru several articles.) One day I was working in the office and moved some of the magazines. Low and behold there was the expansion unit (two drives installed)! It literally was hidden by the magazines. I showed it to the boss and he was "Oh, thats where that went."
Shades of Billy Sol Estes, who while being audited on site for his inventory of grain trucks, (the hoppers towed behind a tractor) had them in a loop being restenciled outside the huge shed where the auditors were. While a Life magazine photographer was on site within the shed taking photographs.
I worked in the warehouse of Apple in Sydney Australia back around that time. We'd bust our guts each month until way past midnight loading trucks and then simply leave the trailers in the yard and unload them the next day. Why? Because the sales staff were doing sweetheart deals with resellers so they could get a big productivity bonus in return for a good deal on equipment after they returned the stock. The general manager caught wind of it and one month came down dragging a very woe-faced bunch of sales staff with him, gave us a corporate card to go out and party and made them unload all the stock and return it to inventory themselves.
I don't understand why so many companies can't accept that there's no such thing as "infante growth", profits will plateau eventually! Just being profitable isn't good enough, every company has to be MORE profitable than last year...
From. 1986 to 1992, I worked in the PC industry in a variety or roles, mostly OEM parts and distribution, both as a buyer and a distributor. This is just one of many shenanigans that occurred. I worked for Cal Abco, and before that was involved with Leading Edge's Ponzi scheme/bankruptcy and also Packard Bell's OEM buy/distributor sales lies. It was the wild west. And Miniscribe was infamous for MFM drives sold as RLL, not IDE...I bought thousands of them, and assumed all warranty risks, as I knew they were selling drives cheap, desperate for cash, and they overrated them.
That reminded me of a USENET conversation I read long ago, back in the PC-XT days and I JUST FOUND IT AGAIN! It was the, "You CAN do it. It'll even format..." that's been taking up three or four neurons for the last 30-odd years. "Sure, Ken. Go for it. Hook that MFM (i.e. NOT RLL-Rated) drive up to that RLL controller, format it, and instant 50% more drive room. You CAN do it. It'll even format. If you're lucky, it might even hold data for a month before it starts developing amnesia." (I soooo wanted it to work, too since from my barely-knowledgeable point of view "the drives are the same, only the encoding is different, right?".)
@@franceslarina5508 Miniscribe was the worst (the 3650 comes to mind) but even Seagate offered the 251 in an "R" version, supposedly certified for RLL, but it was a time bomb, too.
When I saw the titleI was expecting like "the hardrives were so fault that their bricked after just a few days", didn't expected the story to include literal bricks.... Great video!
I have my dads old accounting machine from the the very end of the 1980s, probably 88 or 89 with a 32mb mfm mini-scribe "hardcard" (mfm controller with a mounting bracket for a 3.5" drive), Oddly enough, it still worked the last time I powered it up, although it is getting full of bad sectors, and starting to get spindle stiction. Might be one from the end of the line of mini-scribe. Cool story!
@The Kombinator We had one in one of our IBMs. I'm not sure which model it was but it as an add on as our machine didn't have a hard drive. And I remember it didn't even work right back then.. ended up upgrading the whole computer.
I had a few of those 40mb hard drives back in the 80's for use on Amiga systems. One of them bricked right out of the box sounded like the head fell off inside the drive returned from where I got it for a refund. The other ran for a few years until it died. Luckily I had the data on it already transferred to a maxtor that worked for many many years until it succumbed to a basement flood. Never bought another miniscribe. I knew that Maxtor had bought them out I however did not know about the fraud.
Aaaahhhhh yes, Miniscribe -- I remember that whole scandal well. That was in my early IT days and was instrumental in opening my eyes to the fact that like the Force -- the world of computing also had a dark side.
Never heard of this case before and it just goes to show that venture capitalism is damned near the same thing as gambling. Thanks for the laughs (your edits are hilarious) and the interesting story!
"Hello, thank you for calling Miniscribe customer support. How can I help you?" "I have a dead mouse." " Miniscribe sells hard drives. We don't sell mice." "I know."
I just discovered this channel thanks to the RUclips algorithm, and I gotta say I love the silly editing style. It's like listening to a REALLY good lecture by a computer professor in college. Amazing work.
Homage to Impossible Mission (8:05), nice touch. I lived through this period (remember when the brick story hit newswires), still I had one of their 20M 3.5 inch SCSI drive in my Amiga 2000. It worked well, better than the company...apparently
Nice to see I wasn't the only one to pick up on the Impossible Mission reference. Still remember my first XT clone - splurged on 2 x 20MB hard drives; at the cost of having to settle for only a CGA graphics card.
Now I really want an external hard drive enclosure that looks like a brick. Good video, very interesting hearing a story of computers and fraud before many of us were even born. Probably has the most hilarious bit of absurdity with the hard drive bricks.
Throughly enjoy your videos and their historical value 👍 Watching these always makes me know my age, so thanks 😉🤣 Not often enough videos for me, nevertheless, your videos are always of high quality. Keeps up your excellent work and presentation 😀
Many thanks! I always dread doing the documentary ones because they take so long to produce, and I'm not content to just do a basic slideshow type thing. I won't win the algorithm but I'm glad and flattered that you are enjoying them.
I bought my first 80286-based PC in 1988, which had a 40 megabyte Miniscribe hard drive. At the time, MS-DOS could only support a primary (boot) partition size of 32 megabytes or less. So I ended up having to partition this 40 MB drive into a 30 MB boot partition and a 10 MB "extra" partition. Partitioning wasn't built into MS-DOS at the time, so a 3rd party driver had to manage the partitions. It was installed as a .SYS (similar to a TSR -- a Terminate and Stay Resident program -- but loadable earlier on in the boot process). Oh, and when you wanted to shut down your PC, you had to type PARK at the command line first. This moved the hard drive's read-write arm to its parking position. If you didn't, the hard drive's read-write arm would stay in the middle of the platter and could potentially damage it.
Not sure whether to be disappointed (because I was expecting a saga of 'bricked' drives) or delighted that Miniscribe used actual, real housebricks in their fraud. :)
This is a fantastically researched video. It takes alot of work to get this info together like this to tell the story, but having pictures and original news articles is a wonderful addition.
That type of book cooking goes on at most companies. Especially at sales type organizations. Pumping up and sending out unneeded orders at the end of a period, only to eat it at the beginning of the next. Loading trucks with invoiced orders at the end of a quarter, only to return to inventory the next day. Cycling all short inventory as damaged. The list goes on and on... I had worked over 20 years for the largest makers of cereal and witnessed this constantly. Then went on to be employed by a large cookie and confectionary company. Where the same shuffling continued.
It's interesting to think this might be happening to some big well-known 'unsinkable' company today... excellent video, well presented, and thoroughly enjoyed
Update: I apologize for the 'tinny, bassy' audio. I was still learning the ropes with audio when I produced this, and made a bad decision to use my RODE lapel mic rather than a Blue Snowball mic that was giving me endless glitches. I tried boosting bass to fix the sound but made it worse. By the time I clued in after upload, it was too late. I eventually bought a Blue Yeti. I desperately want to redo the audio here but the only option is to delete and reupload, and lose all the views and awesome comments. I really wish RUclips would revisit the options for post-upload editing! Anyway, I promise the newer videos are much better. Yay Yeti!
Goofs:
1) I've gotten a fair number of comments about the throwaway joke at the end (are bricks MFM or IDE). :) Yeah I goofed there. At that point I was thinking in terms of how they would have been marketed. It's been a long time but I recall my favorite haunt marketing both 'MFM' and 'IDE' drives based on their physical interface. I may be wrong with regards to Miniscribe.. they may have had an IDE drive by 1987 but it's not clear. But yeah if we are talking about encoding bricks, certainly they would have been RLL. 😀
2) Shugart & Associates and Shugart Technology are two different companies, founded by the same man. Shugart Tech *did* develop the 5.25 ST506/412 drive, but they changed their name rather quickly to Seagate to avoid legal trouble with SA owner Xerox, and they never to my knowledge made any floppy drives.
I hope you enjoy this video as much as I enjoyed making it. Close to 50 hours went into it, from research to scripting, recording and 'very special' effects. I think I watched it 50 times, ever mindful of audio issues and video glitches. I think on a technical level it's the best I've produced so far. Which admittedly isn't saying much! I do enjoy documentaries, but boy do they take a long time to produce. Cheers!
Bless you for covering this topic. One of the more fascinating stories that people should be aware of from this era.
It was great!
Well, the final product was very entertaining and interesting. And yes the research showed. So thank you for showing me something I knew nothing of.
It's absolutely hilarious - and of course very well done! Thank you so much for creating such valuable content for us to enjoy for free on this platform! Greatly appreciated!
FYI, the bricks were 5.25" ESDI :)
"Accounting mistakes do happen." A place I worked, somebody moved the decimal point when doing the books and marked down a $10,000 deposit for a $1,000 deposit. When the accountant discovered the $9000 difference between the bank account and the books, the answer was obvious to him. The employees must be stealing.
A 9xxx difference in bookkeeping is even for novice business economics students a mistype or miscalculation.
We are human, mistakes do happen. But it amazes me that we only make companies report in the millions for SEC reports.. Crazy how much $$ could hide / accumulate in these though 🤷🏼♂️
As what happened with the British Post Office. The Computer can't be Wrong. Many lives Destroyed. But many Postmasters Exonerated.
@@derekmulready1523 what happened? is there a name for it?
@@michaelwerkov3438 The Horizon scandal. The Post Office and Fujitsu did not come out of that smelling of roses. A lot of Post Office workers were wrongly convicted of having fingers in the till and at least one killed themselves.
About 20 years back I was taking an Ethics class as a part of my undergrad program. When the bankruptcy audit is starting, they tend to bring in specialists on this sort of thing, and they brought in my then Ethics Professor to become the temporary CFO until the whole federal investigation bankruptcy was completed. He was in one of the warehouses when they started opening boxes of bricks. He was a part of getting the company's books cleaned up until all the company assets were finally distributed.
The feds used him like this about 4 times. He quit doing those big projects just before Enron blew up. OMG the diagram he drew on the board about Enron was incredible. One of my favorite undergrad classes ever - because of this guy!
Never Trust anything too good to be true be it Stocks, Products, Services, Bonds, Trips etc and only ever invest/spend what you are willing too loose with no form of recourse
Enjoy the new Enron collapse aka Elon Musk / Tesla with multiplier of ten at minimum.
@@XantheFIN right, and we all know it's all because of a guy on Twitter tweeting memes, not multi-trillion financial syndicates... ;-)
@@goqsaneIf Elon heard you saying that he is not the owner of Tesla, he is gonna challange you to a boxing match. And then his mother will cancel it.
@@DarthAwar I ignore every post with randomly capitalized words
When I realized this wasn't stock footage I was confused why the views were so low. Then I saw the size of the channel.
You've got a great delivery and put a lot of effort to make the topic really interesting to a layman. I hope 2022 treats you well.
All that homemade footage is priceless! Definitely my favorite part haha
My favorite part was when he started talking about how the books were slanted it's just a shot of him sitting at a table and the whole building is tilted. First the coffee cup goes, then the computer, then finally his chair starts going down the slant. I'll admit I was getting kind of bored at first, then came all of the original footage. He's got a David Zucker like delivery.
@addition safe The comment IS 2 months old, so yeah.
The views certainly aren't low anymore. Just look up top.☝🏽
7:20 I have such a clear memory of this 1987 Black Monday crash. I was in high school and my economics teacher was teaching us how the stock markets worked. Every student in class was given $10000 to invest and over the weekend we were suppose to select companies to invest out $10000 in. Then on Monday we would turn in our lists. Over the next 2 weeks we would track our investments and in the end whoever earned the most money would get a prize.
Well, we looked in the papers the next day and were stunned at what had happened. No one in my class earned any money, we all lost, but there was one kid who lost the least and he won the prize. I came in somewhere in the middle.
Thank god the $10000 was just imaginary money. The teacher said over all of his classes we lost a couple of million bucks.
I kind of decided that the stock market wasn't for me. What a nightmare!
That crash was the first time I heard my parents use the term 'recession'. That really freaked me out because I didn't understand the difference between that and Depression, and I knew the latter was bad.
@erictaylor5462 If you had invested in the stock market since the time you finished school until now you'd probably be a millionaire. It's never too late , especially in certain tech companies like Amazon , Apple , IBM, Google and microsoft over that time period.
I bought stock on Tuesday.
I tell young people to expect several market crashes over their lifetimes. The people who do the best are those that do not panic.
@@cryptocsguy9282 until they all start getting hit with monopoly charges
@@jamesodell3064 the people who do not panic are the people who have millions upon millions already stored in assets and not liquidity so that they can sweat out the market lows while everyone else is busy jumping from their windows.
serious question: do you think *anything* other than flat-out luck and already having money is necessary to make money on the stock market? because if so, you’re an idiot.
I remember back in the 80s I stopped by Tandon computers in Moorpark CA to pick up my new computer, and they had recently received pallets of bricks instead of hard drives! So yes, they did ship those bricks!!
I never thought I would hear that story again. Thanks for this video!
imagine that. taking a look at the shipment somehow - "damn boys. where's the I/O and power connection for this... brick?"
you still sit here and comment as a middle aged man?
@@morganfreeman5260 get off ur soap box mr been on youtube for 9 years
They were neither IDE or MFM, They were EMDI (Enhanced Masonry Disk Interface).
Hahahahahaha
Stone Concrete Surface Infill... which needed to be terminated.
I was going for ESDI, but on second thought I like your EMDI better.
Nah, RLL surely? :)
skuzzy
I worked at Sun Microsystems in the 90's and there was an engineer on my team who worked at Miniscribe. I remember him telling us this story, we couldn't believe it. Thanks for getting all the rest of the details!
Sun Microsystems was a good party
Compaq was all corruption, why they killed the industry by allowing that.
Why Philips became TSMC?
That is crazy. No wonder y'all refused to believe it.
Man, I used to love those Sun machines. They were just so cool. Loved the way the racks looked and the hardware/software.
You made my childhood friend's modem
He had awful internet.
oh hey, these are the guys who made vm virtualbox
I was an employee of Miniscribe Hong Kong in 1988. We heard a lot of stories when Miniscribe went into Chapter 11. One of the story is they were shipping bricks to customer rather than the real hard drives. We thought it was a silly joke but turned out it was true. Then it was acquired by Maxtor and I stayed there until they moved the factory to China.
[A bit political, don't take too seriously] I love the way you implied China is seperate from Hong Kong, really.
@@WingMaster562 Because it was, Hong Kong was a British colony until 1997
@@JohnZombi88 Pretty much, that's why I never took it. I'm currently at my Computer Science degree.
fuckhandles957 got it right. Hong Kong was, and should be, separate from PRCChina.
And to this day Maxtor keeps shipping bricks, keeping the tradition alive . . . (Can you tell that I am not a fan of Maxtor HDDs? My brother had a Maxtor drive where the plates literally melted into ovals rather than circles. Yes, he opened them up to show me.)
@@DefaultFlameAt least Seagate puts out really decent drives nowadays
I worked at Zenith Data Systems during this era. It was the "Wild West" of computer manufacturing back then. What a time. Edit: And the brick in the box happened elsewhere. We had a couple of people fired at my facility because they (being in the shipping dept.) were placing rocks and bricks in new computer boxes and smuggling the computers out of the plant for black market sales.
Be Glad you didn't own stock in MiniScribe
As part of a complicated real estate deal with a German investor, the bricks were traded overseas for wool, grain, lumber and ore. It fell through because it turned out the island was entirely fictitious.
lol
The scheme fell apart because bricks are less valuable in the lategame than at the start.
Was a 20 something engineer working for a supplier to Miniscribe during that era... visited that Longmont CO facility often. Interesting times. It was really not a secret by those close to Miniscribe that shady things were going on. Anything related to the PC business at that time was truly the "wild west". I actually went to work at the Longmont facility a few years later after it had been purchased and taken over by Maxtor... probably one of the most toxic environments I ever worked in.
What kinds of trains were you driving before you moves on to miniscibe?
I find it kind of funny that there was a bunch of tech companies in Longmont. Now It's all breweries it would seem.
@@Gatorade69 Breweries? old Tech companies? I'm there
@@Sauceyjames Yeah, There's like 12 breweries in the city with a couple of them being decently sized like Oskar Blues (Dales Pale Ale) and Left Hand brewing. Lots of breweries in general in Colorado. I remember that IBM and Maxtor had offices in Longmont but looking it up it says that Intel, Seagate, Western Digital, Texas Instruments have offices there and more. When I was living there in 2017 the economy seemed really good and It's not too far from Boulder which IMO is a really fun party town, definitely better than Denver.
Colorado really seemed to be a hotspot for the early days of Personal Computers. In Colorado Springs there are endless buildings you can trace back to HP, DEC, various floppy disk manufacturers, semiconductor companies, and tons more I'm forgetting.
They got caught when the bricks were returned. The warehouse staff was not in on it, the bricks were processed as returned new inventory, then they were shipped out to a customer. The customer received them (a distributer in Boulder IIRC), the owner went down to his loading dock to get one to upgrade his own computer, and discovered it was a brick. He figured it was someone on his warehouse staff until he checked more boxes and found the whole pallet was bricks. It is my understanding that they were dumped in a field east of Longmont. At this point the game collapsed. The mantra under Wiles was "make the numbers", those of us who understood what was going on knew it was really "make up the numbers". Anyway, it seems that our management was not even competent as crooks.
They shipped a brick to Boulder? Well, that'll never work. That's a good way to end up a victim of basalt and battery.
Interesting. US v Wiles made no mention of that. They detailed literally everything else about the case.. all the meetings, etc. But their final word was simply that the company began to collapse when basic bills couldn't be paid.
Since the "bricks" were in a separate isolated warehouse with no staff, and the transactions were ALL on paper, there was no bricks moving out, let alone being returned. So, this "Distributor in Boulder" story reeks of Urban Myth (or BS, if we all be honest).
@@johncoops6897 Not quite, they got greedy. The bricks were initially shipped out and booked as revenue. This is where the semi tractor-trailers came in; it was temporary storage. After the quarter was booked they returned them to Longmont, and recorded the value as returned goods without subtracting from the previous quarters revenue. Their error was in not intercepting the returned goods, and they were sold again, this time to a real customer. Believe what you wish; I was standing behind the drunken CFO as he explained it to a friend at the company Christmas party. He also said that Wiles had ordered him to burn the books. He noted that he had kept a copy so he could turn evidence. And, as an aside, why would the bricks have existed if the transactions only existed on paper? They made a show of having the "material" move around.
@@johnanon6938 Not sure there was ever a reason for additional lawsuits, once the problem was discovered the material was replaced. Most of the employees were honest.
I bought a 40 meg MiniScribe at the Software House in Dallas in 1988. I think I paid $300 for it. I installed it in my XT clone, my brother, who is an Electrical Engineer that helped me build my XT clone 6 months prior, told me that they use MiniScribe's as door stops at their office since they have a reputation of crashing. I told him it was the best $300 dollars I spent. 6 months later it died. Now I know the rest of the story...Paul Harvey...Good Day....!
Yeah I don't remember having much luck with them either. I ended up sticking with Conner during those years. The old machines I have that have them seem to be having this issue where the spindle locks up.. some kinda weird magnetic thing. I can manually 'hand crank' them but inevitably they seize up again when turned off.
@@TechTimeTraveller poor spindle bearings, that was my experience also
Ummm... $300 for a 40 Mb drive (of any kind) in 1988? That's absurdly low.
@@the_kombinator My guess would be most stores knew their product was junk by ‘88 hence the drastic price difference
@@the_kombinator I remember in 1992, buying a 50MB Quantum IDE drive at Radio Shack, it was $500. I think that my first Seagate RLL 30MB with controller card was around $375 in 1987.
It took me like 10 minutes before I realized that this wasn’t stock footage lmfao- you’ve earned yourself a sub!
Many thanks. I don't like stock footage so I kinda made my own. Unfortunately I only have one actor I can afford to pay. :)
Very good summary. I worked for Miniscribe for a year in the 80's and the culture was definitely corrupt. We spent the year and $4M building a robotic assembly line for a drive that was obsolete before we finished.
I have touched the big drive at 1:41. It was the first "successful" working hard disk. Arms were pneumatically controlled. The motor looked used and like something out of a washing machine. It was at IBM's San Jose office and when they downsized they planned to junk it (as they had most of their other "museums"). Last I heard, someone convinced them to save it, if for nothing else to donate to the Smithsonian.
MiniScribe was full of liars!!!
I would LOVE to get a factory packaged MiniScribe brick. That would be the coolest paperweight or bookend. :D
Wonder how much worth would new old stock, unopened one be among collectors. And further yet, might LGR afford to open one for oddware :)
indeed, and the ultimate retro tech gag gift.
Be too easy to make a fake one. Providence is 99.99% of the value here.
@@russellstyles5381 Yep true. And honestly, I don't want them to exist in first place... And if unopened NOS is found, I actually wonder if anyone knows whether there is a brick or hdd inside :D Well sure it could xrayed.
@@russellstyles5381
"provenance" -> the origin of an item for sale
"providence" -> a gift from a higher power
"Incorrect use of mortar voids warranty." 🤣 This is great. Thanks for telling a really interesting story.
I lost it at "we pretend, you pretend". Someone clearly had too much fun with that invoice.
@@hinzster thanks
Reminds me of the weeny tots from married with children and you could expose them to air.
The invoice was at 12:25 in case anyone else wants to go back and look at it again 😂
I worked at a small software company in 1983-84, with about 3 or 4 other programmers. The floppy disks were 5 1/4", and really were floppy. Only one of us had a hard drive (5 MB), and he was responsible for keeping all the software builds. (It was an external drive, in a fairly large box. I also remember seeing a secret pre-release Mac on the desk of one of the company's owners. I pushed a key on the keyboard out of curiosity, and crashed it. :)
They invented the extremely solid state drive. Why were they not billionaires?
This was excellent! Well researched, well presented, and just an optimal length! Thank-you for continuing to produce such high quality content.
Ironically, I was in Business School when Miniscribe finally fell apart, yet there was no discussion in any of my classes about the fraud or (more importantly) the management culture that lead to it.
Many thanks. In my research for this video I did find a few current business courses where the Miniscribe mess is a case study. I think because they were a relatively young hard drive maker, at a time when home computers were still a new thing, they just didn't get as much attention.
I worked at Maxtor in Longmont, CO a few years after this happened. I started, in '93, as an assembler on the pilot production line. There were still a bunch of people, engineers and techs, there that had worked at Miniscribe and man did I hear stories.
Met some of the material handlers that had worked at Miniscribe and heard stories from them about what they were hauling around, lol.
I know one of the failure analysis techs on the production line had one of the boxed bricks as a memento.
Fascinating!! Really hoping one of the boxed bricks shows up some day. Figure there has to be at least a dozen or so out there. What a keepsake..
@@TechTimeTraveller If we could find some of those people and interview 'em...
My mom worked there. There’s a half decent chance I’ve met you lol
I was hired in the spring of 1981 as a janitor at Miniscribe. I was approximately employee #105. Such heady times. I'm thinking by the beginning of 1983, there were 1500 people in 3 buildings. I was promoted to facilities and we would move into empty buildings and build cleanrooms and offices for production. I was convinced(long story) to apply to a Facility Managers job and worked for 6 months in my new job and was laid off right after New Years day of 1983. There were about 19 layoffs in that span that I avoided until then. I was rehired to fitup another building and was laidoff in late 1983. I'm thinking in the summer of 1982, Miniscribe went public and word on the street was that it created 8 millionaires that day. Of course I heard about the rocks and was glad I wasn't around.
The lengths to which they went for that level of fraud is almost impressive, holy crap!
A cabal of executives and managerials embezzling the company. Big salaries, fat bonuses, great lifestyle. They should've all been audited, retroactively fined and punished if they'd had any involvement, if they'd accepted any bribes and payments from stolen money. Instead, "justice" was served by sacrificing the intended scapegoats.
check out fraud happening to this day. between chase and a female running off with millions, the top of the gov and family there of. absolute power corrupts absolutely. of course conspiracies such as this video is cheap tricks to the people at the top these days. ooooooo the big c word, conspiracy. all it means is 2 or more people taking part in a crime, nothing fringe about that people, thanks the social engineering post JFK death. next - AI committing conspiracy, a wave of processing power and potential
FACT : There is no current SSD rated for Achival backups ( Long Term) due to loss of data over time. It's either Tape or spinning drives backups for extended long term storage. SSD backup drives need to be powered up once in a while to do any error data corrections, garbage collection, trim the Cells. This is what was happening earlier to Samsung SDD’s data leaking over time when unpowered for long periods of time.
why would you need to do garbage collection and cell trimming when the data on the drive doesnt change?
Yeah I'm sorry but I'm trusting a chip to survive a lot longer than a spinning drive. Offline or online.
@@unitrader403 @678rwhp because the bits in a SSD degrade over time.
@@678rwhp same and if you're worried just power them on every so often
@@678rwhpFor those curious: what this meant is that you can remove the drive from the computer, hide it in a box, and after a long time the data would still be there when you reconnect it. Flash storage don't have that kinda feature, but it shouldn't really matter to an average gamer. So you could say that SSD's are somewhat less volatile than RAM lmao
"Bricks don't fuss over what communication protocol you use"
Actually laughed out loud at this one. Fantastic story, and instant subscribe!
they give the bricks serial numbers
and that sums everything up
Bricks are considerate that way 😊
I can't believe I didn't know about this! Expertly researched and explained, thanks.
Many thanks! I've watched your channel for years! It always inspires me to "take it apart!!" :)
@@TechTimeTraveller don't take it apart!....turn it on...
If I'm not mistaken, IDE was high-end back then (first produced in 1987), so those bricks would have been MFM or maybe RLL, which premiered in 1979. Many 3.5" 20-megabyte HDDS of that time were RLL, because that was the most efficient mix of magnetic media quality, number of disks inside the drive (and therefore number of components), and electronic complexity. So the final comment of the entire video looks a bit half-assed ;)
(My parents had a Miniscribe HDD back then, and it was decent. It lost a sector every once in a while, but nothing that Norton's Disk Tester couldn't fix. There was usually no loss of data, just some funny noises followed by an error message or a sudden program crash.
Could you recommend this great channel on your also great channel?
@@achtsekundenfurz7876 back then, Miniscribe did IDE drives nearly exclusively and exclusively toward the end.
They started with stepper motor models, which I used a fair number of, then they switched to voice coil models, then to bricks.
Losing sectors was a sign of losing the plating on the platter on some drives, that'd increase more and more until the drive entirely failed. That was in the early voice coil models.
Earlier stepper motor models would gradually lose a sector or two over longer time frames, mapping the dead sector out from the bad sector list (voice coil drives did too and still do) until they run out of spare sectors. Either way, start seeing losses, plan for replacement soon...
"Brick your hard drive." Funny.
I was working for a company that supplied Miniscribe with the hard disks for their drives when this went down. They had been pressuring us to send more and more disks to meet their "demand", which we did. First we heard was when they said they were returning the disks and for us to pick up tens of thousands of disks from their loading dock. That returned product blew a hole in our balance sheets as well.
Years later I wound up working for Maxtor in SJ and traveled to the Longmont facility where the ghosts from Miniscribe still lingered. No bricks lying around though, I asked.
I love the personal acting! It’s actually so unique compared to what a lot of RUclips channels do using stock footage and pictures. Loved it!
That poor internal auditors counts eventually spiraling into despair with 'HUH?!!! and NONE!!!" killed me. Great content. Subscribed.
1 (Under secretary's desk.)
Loved this. I was at Hewlett-Packard those years, and knew senior execs and investors in all these disk drive companies, but never knew the whole story of MiniScribe. The lesson for younger people - it’s a good thing we have FTC and SEC oversight of all traded companies!
Yeah because that totally prevented this fraud from happening, right?!
I was vaguely aware of this story since I was a tech support engineer at Sequent Computer Systems where I started working in 1982. Sequent had a similar, but far less damaging, scandal a couple of decades later when it was found to have "shipped" computers to customers that technically left the loading dock but weren't actually in a state to be delivered to the customer. The "shipments" were then returned to the manufacturing facility after the end-of-quarter sales numbers were booked (and were never seen by a customer). Whereupon the builds were actually completed and a real shipment happened a few weeks later. The necessity to meet quarter year targets mandated by Wall Street has caused many company executives to be "creative".
Ah, vulture capitalists. Not the first nor the last company they'll ruin. Miniscribe would've likely fallen apart without their help but it would've been sooner and less dramatically, and so we probably wouldn't have the brick story to tell.
Miniscribe's legacy of quality lived on at Maxtor for years, which is one of the many reasons I never trusted those drives either.
"Good inventory and the integrity of honest reporting are the mortar that holds this company together...now hit the bricks, there's more money to be made!"
- Someone at MiniScribe...probably.
I worked for a small computer store and we picked up a new source for hard drives. Yup, you guessed it; Miniscribe. They were our loudest hard drive, but we thought they were cool. 20 MB drives that cost less than Seagate, who had gone through their own scandal. Not many had heard of it though. The son of one of their chief engineers shopped in my store and i got to know him. One day he told me his father had quit. Seagate wasn't honest and he didn't agree with what they were doing. There was a known bug in the firmware for one of their discs that caused them to go bad after a year to 18 months of use. Seagate decided not to fix it because the drives were going to be out of warranty and people would buy new drives, making Seagate wealthier. The store stopped buying that model of drive, which was Seagate's most popular drive.
Back to Miniscribe: one order we got included bad drives. They clunked and rattled. Every single one in the shipment. We stopped ordering because they lied to us about the drives. They told us it was clear we had dropped the shipping container. We hadn't. The shipper said there wasn't any record of anything in their trucks getting dropped. Something was fishy.
Then we heard about the bricks. Real bricks...
That's awesome and sad at the same time. :) I do feel for the honest employees who got caught in the middle, and all the mom and pop investors who got burned when Miniscribe went down. I didn't know about that bug with Seagate. I do remember them having all kinds of issues later on with firmware bugs in their 1tb desktop drives.
I have a couple Miniscribe HDs and every time I look at them, I can’t stop imagining them as red bricks.
I seriously hope one of the actual fraud bricks in original package appears one day.
@@TechTimeTraveller Just think of the $$$ a brick in a hard drive box would bring in.
@@TechTimeTraveller maybe it'll be RLL!
@@TechTimeTraveller They are probably part of a housing estate that was built shortly after the audit was finished .....
I was ordering and installing Miniscribe drives back in the day, and realized something squirrelly was going on at the end. I also heard that people had ordered drives and received bricks. That might have been after the end, and maybe just myth.
Sounds like some actually DID get bricks because newer warehousing staff weren't in on the brick thing and literally delivered them out to customers.
highly likely it did happen, or that Miniscribe weren't the only ones to pull that stunt. There have been multiple stories about people receiving bricks instead of harddrives and it must have originated somewhere
When I worked for Seagate at that time, we heard that bricks where ADDED to the boxes to make the accounting think more were being shipped, because the packages would weigh more. Nice to finally get the full story.
It’s so clear how much effort was put into researching/writing/editing this. Excellent telling of an absolutely bonkers story
I remember this happening. IIRC, it really came to a head when the bricks got delivered. The fertilizer really hit the air movement device at that point.
The bricks were all ESDI. Which in this case stood for Efficient Silicate Desk Impactor.
Efficient Silicate-based Disk Imitator
@@fluffyjello Efficient Silicate-based Disk impersonator
Engineers would point out that the compressive strength of the brick compares favorably to aluminum housing on a late 80's HDD.
My drive was ESDI too.
Why stop there? You can impact any number of things with your average brick.
It's crazy to see how far we've come with hard drives, and storage in general. I pulled an old 380G HDD out of a PC over the weekend and didn't even bother to put it back because it added so little storage as a second drive. Even growing up all I had was floppies with a handful of MBs of storage. Crazy
Oh boi... my first hdd was something like 22MB (paired with an 80286 cpu and 1MB ram, and of course a Hercules card), "shortly" I swapped it with a 210MB one.
(edit: ahah now I remember: it was a pain to set up it correctly /type 47 "thingy" in the bios :D /)
I work for a small-ish webhosting company and we are responsible for ~30TB of data (as of today). And it's not even "that" much...
The most amazing thing is that you used to be able to take one or two boxes of floppies with you, and they were barely more than 10-20MB.
Now you can easily have 512GB in your pocket. Anytime. Anywhere.
@@TamasJantyik First PC was a 386DX clone with a 40MB hard drive. I was tempted to buy the 80MB, but chickened out.
1981 - DEC PDP11/23 with 8" / 1.2MB DS floppy disk drive, (I believe capacity was approx 0.5MB per side). The step up to a small hard drive, as in 5? MB, was something like an addition $15k. A single HD disk/ platter, certified error free and maybe 11" diameter (?) , were thousands of dollars each. One 8" floppy could store one month's data of 16 component analysis hourly average along with about 10 or 12 other hourly averages, were used for online optimization. Our version of big data/ OLPARS. ☺
@@TamasJantyik Why can't automotive be advanced as electronics?
First (second-hand) PC I had was a 386SX20 with a 20MB hard drive - this thing actually had a lever sticking out of the side of it that rotated as the heads moved. It was a 'full-height' drive i.e.twice the height of a more modern drive, so almost the size of a brick.
The computer store clerk who casually told me in 1993 that Maxtor bought Miniscribe sure missed the best part of the story... Wow!
Well, one of the founders of Miniscribe went on to found Conner, which were marginally better drives. I can still hear my 1991 Compaq Deskpro 386/20e's 42 Mb Conner hard disk startup sound - it was long to spin up and noisy, and the performance was about as good as a 386 in 1995.... crap.
Amiga external HDDs had Conner Peripherals 2.5" SCSI HDDs inside. I have one for my Amiga 500 and it still works. (must have around six years of daily use)
The visual effect at 8:00 from Epyx’ “Impossible Mission” really took me back. Excellent video and background research!
This was an amazing video dude. I chuckled the whole way through. As a present day 30 year old it's hysterical looking at the lengths 80s businessmen went to for an attempt at looking legitimately successful.
The kind of fraud I'm used to seeing usually just involves fake internet fame. People who pay for views or likes just to get that image of success. But, much like a house of miniscribe bricks, the facade falls to reveal the fraud and it's never not funny to watch someone's dishonesty blow up in their face.
This video got a subscription outta me dude 👍 Best of luck with your RUclips journey if you so choose to take that route.
I have direct knowledge of this whole sordid event. I worked with and knew the CEO and the CFO personally. The driver of all of the malfeasance was the unwillingness to take the hit to the stock price that reporting the failure to write down obsolete inventory that had in fact been scrapped. This was a carryover from the previous management team.
It really seems odd that they were willing to risk criminal penalty. It's like they went into a dissociative state.
They got used to living high off of the bonuses. People got desperate when their mortgages were endangered by the loss of those bonuses.
@@vernmeyerotto255 Yep. And back in the 80s, people perpetrating white color crimes were notoriously known for getting easy sentences which included house arrest, a few months stay at club Fed complete with Tennis court, etc. -- You would have to REALLY fuck up to get a serious sentence.
Plus a lot of people actually got away with this shit depending on how egregious the crime. Many would take a plea deal that basically landed them a slap on the wrist for the promise never to do it again. They might get a few years sentence and then end up only serving a few months due to this and that.
Things have changed a bit since then -- but the 80s were well known for the decade of financial decadence and debauchery committed by many who thought they were smarter than uncle Sam.
@@j_m_b_1914
Nothing about that has changed.
Proof that you knew them?
Fascinating. It's amazing they thought they could get away with the fraud by committing more fraud. It's the same mindset of the gambler who loss chases: if you get into debt, borrow more money and gamble that too.
Believe it or not, they had an actual accounting program in-house called 'Cook Book'. I think they *wanted* to go to jail.
this kind of thing happens regularly, I suspect it's more comon now than it was in the 1980s
@@TechTimeTraveller I too doubt Miniscribe was the first scam in Q.T's career. I wonder if his career's been documented?
@RandallFlaggNY Yes.. companies include Silicon General, ADAC Labs, Rexon, Adobe Systems (!!), Granger Telecom and Zymed.
@@TechTimeTraveller Hmm... I'd bet there are people still out there with stories.
So honestly, I want to say what a joy it was to hear and see the story of Miniscribe. The details and playful visuals really made my day. I know this must have taken oodles of time but damn it was worth it. Thanks for adding such richness to the history of tech for future generations to enjoy.
Just found your channel today, as a guy in his mid 30’s I can remember a Tandy from RadioShack being the first computer I ever used which led to a lifelong interest in computers and eventually a degree in computer sciences. Amazing channel! Keep up the great work!
This is a story worth telling. Evocative of Enron and Theranos, etc. The difference being that Miniscribe apparently actually made something, and had assets of value.
At the time Miniscribe was lampooned as "minibrick".. Some drives were iffy. I had three 3650's fail in a week, but then I've seen the 6085 last 20 years and still kickin'. In my opinion, Mini scribe was no worse than any vendor that was not "Seagate". The only significant difference was seek-time, which was for Miniscribe limited by a stepper motor, approximately 40ms. Late models reached 28ms. At that point there was no way to compete without a different technology for stepping. The industry settled on an analog seeking method based on the
sniffing' of pre-recorded data to reference user-written data. Wedge-servo gave way to embedded servo. There's a lot going on here.
The 3053 had a 28ms seek time, it was the voice coil type. Five data heads, the sixth head was the servo track. I had one for probably four or five years, but eventually 40 meg wasn’t enough. It was still working fine until I replaced it with a much larger IDE drive.
@@dale116dot7 That was a very late Miniscribe model. I didn't know they'd gone voice-coil. You mention the sixth head, which is a wonder to me as it is only me who asked that question. Why configure FIVE heads when five means that there are at least three platters, and thus six surfaces. The ST4096 was the one that made me ask the question, waaaay long time ago. Servo data is pre-recorded on one face of a platter (head 0), and that information cannot be altered by any user-initiated process. The actuator is a voice-coil, which is a tuned device similar in concept to the coil that drives a speaker cone. The controller will throw the head out with a pre-determined force, and then sniff along the servo, tuning the seek to perfection. It is an active process requiring a much smarter onboard set of electronics than the previous, stepper motor actuator. With a stepper actuator there is no servo and thus no 'wasted' storage, which in the case of the ST4096 is 10%, in the ST251 it is 20%.... In order to get increased seek speeds, the total possible storage of a drive was limited by one whole surface and head). Later drives used a system called "Wedge-servo", where the servo information was prerecorded on a surface or surfaces, but did not exclude the use of that same surface for user-data. Again, a lot smarter electronics were required, but the space the servo took up was significantly reduced and storage space gained.
@@Technoid_Mutant The BIOS setup was five heads, the sixth head was for servo which couldn’t be used for data as you describe above. The electronics board was pretty full, all through hole parts. I don’t know that I’d ever seen a through hole PCB as full as that one.
The 8051 had embedded servo, and had the 28 mSec seek time. The other voice coil drives (all 5 1/4 inch) used a dedicated servo surface. Everything else was a rack and pinion stepper motor. The 8051 is notable as it and the new 7000 series (1" high drive based on the 8051) were the only products that survived the transition to Maxtor. We never did a wedge servo, that was a Quantum patent.
And Seagate isn't free of fault themselves. The infamous ST3000DM001 with it's high failure rate that lead to a class action. I had one and it did fine, running more than 50k hours over 8 years.
Or the old IBM 60GXP and 75GXP Deathstars.
I wonder if anyone in the management team seriously considered just burning the place to the ground. Thanks for the great way you told this tale.
I'm certain based on some of the horror stories I've read that that was likely not only contemplated but attempted. But bricks don't burn well...
No, but on layoff Fridays one was wise to stay away from the windows. More than once, someone took a potshot at building 1.
Honestly, yeah, why didn’t they fill those boxes with electronic waste and torch the lot? An insurance payout would have squared the books nicely. If Management can’t be creative, what good is it?
I subscribed immediately and consider myself fortunate that I found your channel. This is excellent reporting on a fascinating subject! Thank you for having such a good narrator who is a live person! It's about two orders of magnitude better than a droning machine. I was a programmer building my own systems during this time, so I kind of lived it, but this fills in so much that I wasn't aware of at the time. All good wishes.
only clicked out of sheer boredom, but I am loving the little acted out visualisations of events. so charming
Imagine those people who hoards new old stock hardware, unboxing a new miniscibe mfm drive only to find a vacuum sealed brick. Then realising they have another 100 of them.
Nicely done. Man, I'd love to get a hold of one of those boxed bricks. It'd go great next to the mug I got from a college friend, who's first job out of school was with an energy firm in Houston named 'Enron.'
I figure there has to be at least one out there somewhere. Some disgruntled employee *must* have kept a memento.
@@TechTimeTraveller Aye, that's how I ended up with the mug. She couldn't stand to look at it anymore.
I've got a few Maxtor mugs from when I worked there in the early '90s.
Look for any Valujet items?
Hard to prove provenance. Too easy to fake it, you'd never know if it was really one of the bricks.
Interesting story. In 1987 I worked in Canada's largest reseller of Hard drives and other peripherals, including a metric shit-tonne of Miniscribe. I had never heard this story until today. I wasn't in the shipping department so never had the pleasure of returning bricks.
Wow, nostalgia time. In my very early 20's (which was in the very early 80's) I worked for a peripherals company in Silicon Valley. They had gone public riiiiight before the personal computer bust that happened around that time. I remember the CEO proudly driving a Benz with the company's stock market symbol (CRMK if you want to look it up) on the vanity plate. Not long after I started working there they started pulling the same tricks as described in this video. One difference is that their products had so many problems with defects that they had plenty of actual units sitting around on pallets to toss in the boxes, ship, and have returned immediately (repeat ad nauseum). They were also pulling some kind of tricks where they wouldn't close out a month's sales until a monetary target had been reached. I'd go back to the shipping department 3/4 of the way through June and they would still be frantically shipping fake orders from March. This was to inflate the figures for how much they were shipping. I wound up getting laid off 2 weeks after my 1-year review, which was excellent, but they gave me no raise, saying they couldn't afford it. I think at the time I was making $6 an hour and I was in engineering! To give me even a buck an hour raise would have cost them $40 a week. Obviously, I was PISSED and said so, having stuck with the company for a year at the peanuts wage believing what they had told me about how they were going to reward me at my review. I expressed my disappointment and anger and they begged me to stay. 14 days later, so long, we have to cut staff. So they choose not someone in management making $1000 a week but a guy making $240 a week, probably the lowest paid employee in the place. That's part of the whole financial thing, analysts and lenders look at "number of employees vs. sales" regardless of how much any given employee makes or what they do. That's why it makes better "sense" to lay off the people who actually do the work rather than the ones who sit on their asses and collect fat checks. But that was the 80's for you. Greed greed greed. I do believe it's gotten better in some ways, but still rotten. At one point in my career I swore off ever working for publicly traded companies for this reason. To hell with stock options that go underwater a month after they're issued.
This is the first video I've found from your channel. I love your original video segments!! They're so perfect and funny.
Interesting! I knew Miniscribe got into financial trouble and was eventually bought by/sold to Maxtor, but hadn't heard the full history of it!
As luck would have it, I just went through 9x Miniscribe 8438 and 8425 3.5" MFM drives this week. Seven good!
I was hit by this mess, a 40 megabyte Miniscribe was purchased from Sam's Club in Dallas, lacking its analog board.
MiniScrap :)
Great telling of this story and the humor makes it even better. However, the opportunity of opportunities was missed for the best hard drive joke of all time.
Customer: Hey, you guys shipped me a brick instead of a hard drive!
Miniscribe: No we didn't.
Customer: Yes, you did.
Miniscribe: It's not a brick, it's a block device.
What I'd like to know is whether the bricks were solid, or the type with three holes, as both varieties appeared in this video!?!
I worked at MiniScribe in 1987 and 1988. Yes, things were booming. The first inkling I had that something was wrong was in early 1988 when one of the material controllers came around to our lab demanding that we relinquish all of the preproduction hard drive cases we used to build up test hard drive assemblies. None of this could be used for production units, so this request seemed off. The 40 MB product line moved from a growth phase to mature product stage that spring, and I moved on to a new 300 MB 2-1/4" project. The project stalled as senior management became involved in the latest company audit, and the temp workers were let go at the end of the 1st quarter. QT had been spending a lot of time in Longmont, and an obscure financial officer, Owen Taranta, began spending a lot of time in our building. I remember seeing management types eyeing the auditors locked boxes - none of this seemed right. About this time, many people were laid off, including myself. I learned later from a friend who lasted longer that an assembly tech he was dating had been working in an old building we called "the cow palace." She had been sworn to secrecy, told she would be "taken care of," and had been assembling product from junk HDA cases (that explained something,) nonfunctional control boards and damaged discs. These junk drives had been shipped to distributors, and allegedly stored behind sheetrock walls until after the end of the quarter to be returned as failed product during the ensuing quarter. These dead drives were called "bricks," starting the legend of "shipping bricks." Since they ran out of junk product fairly quickly, turning to real bricks ensued.
In 1989, I purchased a Packard-Bell PC from Service Merchandise for the 'bargain price' of just $2,000. The unit was equipped with a 40 MB "High Reliability" Miniscribe HD drive. But less than 1 year later, this "high reliability" drive was reporting numerous sector problems almost every time I turned it on, to the point that only a few months later, it had to be replaced. When I went to get a replacement for it, I was wondering why it was so difficult finding another Miniscribe drive. I didn't know the full story until now, the company was actually in bankruptcy at the time. I eventually wound up replacing the entire machine with one that used Western Digital drives instead and have been with them continuously since. Jeez! If I had even the slightest inkling of what was going on, I would have never bought the damn thing in the first place! The brick might have actually worked better!
No idea how I stumbled across this video, but it's always thrilling to find an interesting videomaker, especially one who has a decent back catalog to binge. I'm really loving the visuals/pantomimes you're doing. Keep up the great work!
6:33 I had always assumed the acronym "WTF" had risen to popularity with the rise in popularity of the internet. But here it is on an audit from 1987! xD
Wow, I hadn't heard about this fraud before. I'm glad I haven't worked for anyone that sleezy in my career.
Great video! I love your greenscreen editing. It adds a lot of fun and charm to the presentation.
I love the skits and dry humor. I watch a lot of vintage tech videos and this is already one of my favorites!
Remember when a desktop computer came with a green screen and two 8” floppy discs? There was enough aluminium in the disc drive chassis that it warped the local space/time/gravitational hole. It also gave you a pulled lumbar muscle if you tried to move it on your own!
I have a TRS 80 Model II with the optional 3 8 inch drive expansion unit. I'm terrified of it. You turn it on, all the lights in the house dim. I have nightmares of it trying to eat me.
@@TechTimeTraveller My first job in 1982 the boss had a TRS-80 model II in his office buried in magazines (compile times were long enough to get thru several articles.) One day I was working in the office and moved some of the magazines. Low and behold there was the expansion unit (two drives installed)! It literally was hidden by the magazines. I showed it to the boss and he was "Oh, thats where that went."
With fraud stories being all the rage right now this is one I'd love to see turned into a movie or mini-series.
Shades of Billy Sol Estes, who while being audited on site for his inventory of grain trucks, (the hoppers towed behind a tractor) had them in a loop being restenciled outside the huge shed where the auditors were.
While a Life magazine photographer was on site within the shed taking photographs.
I worked in the warehouse of Apple in Sydney Australia back around that time. We'd bust our guts each month until way past midnight loading trucks and then simply leave the trailers in the yard and unload them the next day. Why? Because the sales staff were doing sweetheart deals with resellers so they could get a big productivity bonus in return for a good deal on equipment after they returned the stock.
The general manager caught wind of it and one month came down dragging a very woe-faced bunch of sales staff with him, gave us a corporate card to go out and party and made them unload all the stock and return it to inventory themselves.
I don't understand why so many companies can't accept that there's no such thing as "infante growth", profits will plateau eventually! Just being profitable isn't good enough, every company has to be MORE profitable than last year...
The capitalist requirement of infinite growth is possibly the biggest problem on earth today
The financial department managed to “brick” so many hard drives at once! That’s a record! 😂
Maybe static electricity bricked them?
From. 1986 to 1992, I worked in the PC industry in a variety or roles, mostly OEM parts and distribution, both as a buyer and a distributor. This is just one of many shenanigans that occurred. I worked for Cal Abco, and before that was involved with Leading Edge's Ponzi scheme/bankruptcy and also Packard Bell's OEM buy/distributor sales lies. It was the wild west. And Miniscribe was infamous for MFM drives sold as RLL, not IDE...I bought thousands of them, and assumed all warranty risks, as I knew they were selling drives cheap, desperate for cash, and they overrated them.
That reminded me of a USENET conversation I read long ago, back in the PC-XT days and I JUST FOUND IT AGAIN! It was the, "You CAN do it. It'll even format..." that's been taking up three or four neurons for the last 30-odd years.
"Sure, Ken. Go for it. Hook that MFM (i.e. NOT RLL-Rated) drive up to that RLL controller, format it, and instant 50% more drive room. You CAN do it. It'll even format.
If you're lucky, it might even hold data for a month before it starts developing amnesia."
(I soooo wanted it to work, too since from my barely-knowledgeable point of view "the drives are the same, only the encoding is different, right?".)
@@franceslarina5508 Miniscribe was the worst (the 3650 comes to mind) but even Seagate offered the 251 in an "R" version, supposedly certified for RLL, but it was a time bomb, too.
Superb storytelling. "Creative accounting" is a major unit in all commerce graduate studies.
First video of yours I've watched, my impression: absolutely love the production quality, funny af
Many thanks!! Appreciate it a lot!
When I saw the titleI was expecting like "the hardrives were so fault that their bricked after just a few days", didn't expected the story to include literal bricks....
Great video!
So did I, that a company was knowingly selling broken harddrives to make up for sales figures or something
The shocked notes on the inventory sheet at 6:50 are the absolute best, don't see that every day
No kidding. Computers are so white people as well. Without white people we would probably never have gotten the transistor or vacuum tube.
I have my dads old accounting machine from the the very end of the 1980s, probably 88 or 89 with a 32mb mfm mini-scribe "hardcard" (mfm controller with a mounting bracket for a 3.5" drive), Oddly enough, it still worked the last time I powered it up, although it is getting full of bad sectors, and starting to get spindle stiction. Might be one from the end of the line of mini-scribe. Cool story!
Spindle stiction! That's what I am dealing with with that drive featured at the very beginning of the video. Couldn't remember the term! Many thanks!
in the last 25 years (and I worked at a computer store in the mid 90s) I have NEVER seen a working HardCard. Do a video about it!
@The Kombinator We had one in one of our IBMs. I'm not sure which model it was but it as an add on as our machine didn't have a hard drive. And I remember it didn't even work right back then.. ended up upgrading the whole computer.
Check out Steve Gibson's SPINRITE for that disk. Might bring it back.
@@KenTenTen It won't. Spinrite is more or less just a snake oil
This is an incredible story and gives a whole new meaning to 'bricked up' and 'bricking your computer'
13:15 Auditor: "What is this"
Manager:"Its a Hard drive"
Auditor:"It looks like a brick"
Manager:"RUDE!"
I had a few of those 40mb hard drives back in the 80's for use on Amiga systems. One of them bricked right out of the box sounded like the head fell off inside the drive returned from where I got it for a refund. The other ran for a few years until it died. Luckily I had the data on it already transferred to a maxtor that worked for many many years until it succumbed to a basement flood. Never bought another miniscribe.
I knew that Maxtor had bought them out I however did not know about the fraud.
Aaaahhhhh yes, Miniscribe -- I remember that whole scandal well. That was in my early IT days and was instrumental in opening my eyes to the fact that like the Force -- the world of computing also had a dark side.
Never heard of this case before and it just goes to show that venture capitalism is damned near the same thing as gambling. Thanks for the laughs (your edits are hilarious) and the interesting story!
Other systems create similar problems: ruclips.net/video/vJFAvVxmh4w/видео.html
"Hello, thank you for calling Miniscribe customer support. How can I help you?"
"I have a dead mouse."
" Miniscribe sells hard drives. We don't sell mice."
"I know."
I just discovered this channel thanks to the RUclips algorithm, and I gotta say I love the silly editing style. It's like listening to a REALLY good lecture by a computer professor in college. Amazing work.
Homage to Impossible Mission (8:05), nice touch. I lived through this period (remember when the brick story hit newswires), still I had one of their 20M 3.5 inch SCSI drive in my Amiga 2000. It worked well, better than the company...apparently
Nice to see I wasn't the only one to pick up on the Impossible Mission reference.
Still remember my first XT clone - splurged on 2 x 20MB hard drives; at the cost of having to settle for only a CGA graphics card.
Now I really want an external hard drive enclosure that looks like a brick. Good video, very interesting hearing a story of computers and fraud before many of us were even born. Probably has the most hilarious bit of absurdity with the hard drive bricks.
I want a raptor brick edition now 🤣🤣
Throughly enjoy your videos and their historical value 👍
Watching these always makes me know my age, so thanks 😉🤣
Not often enough videos for me, nevertheless, your videos are always of high quality. Keeps up your excellent work and presentation 😀
Many thanks! I always dread doing the documentary ones because they take so long to produce, and I'm not content to just do a basic slideshow type thing. I won't win the algorithm but I'm glad and flattered that you are enjoying them.
So much work went into editing this. Thank you!
I bought my first 80286-based PC in 1988, which had a 40 megabyte Miniscribe hard drive.
At the time, MS-DOS could only support a primary (boot) partition size of 32 megabytes or less.
So I ended up having to partition this 40 MB drive into a 30 MB boot partition and a 10 MB "extra" partition.
Partitioning wasn't built into MS-DOS at the time, so a 3rd party driver had to manage the partitions. It was installed as a .SYS (similar to a TSR -- a Terminate and Stay Resident program -- but loadable earlier on in the boot process).
Oh, and when you wanted to shut down your PC, you had to type PARK at the command line first.
This moved the hard drive's read-write arm to its parking position.
If you didn't, the hard drive's read-write arm would stay in the middle of the platter and could potentially damage it.
"The bricks would be turned into... I dunno, patios and stuff?"
I would love to have a patio made out of bricked hard drives... 😅
Not sure whether to be disappointed (because I was expecting a saga of 'bricked' drives) or delighted that Miniscribe used actual, real housebricks in their fraud. :)
Great video! Looks like you had a blast making it.
I won't lie. After the 30th hour working on it, I was mainly amusing myself. :)
@@TechTimeTraveller 😂
This is a fantastically researched video. It takes alot of work to get this info together like this to tell the story, but having pictures and original news articles is a wonderful addition.
That type of book cooking goes on at most companies. Especially at sales type organizations. Pumping up and sending out unneeded orders at the end of a period, only to eat it at the beginning of the next. Loading trucks with invoiced orders at the end of a quarter, only to return to inventory the next day. Cycling all short inventory as damaged. The list goes on and on... I had worked over 20 years for the largest makers of cereal and witnessed this constantly. Then went on to be employed by a large cookie and confectionary company. Where the same shuffling continued.
"One of the Biggest Frauds in Tech History - The Miniscribe Brick Fiasco"
And then there is *Crazy Eddie*
It's interesting to think this might be happening to some big well-known 'unsinkable' company today... excellent video, well presented, and thoroughly enjoyed