My first job in the Mac business was for a small peripheral manufacturer in Minnesota called Mirror Technologies. I started there in 1987, working as a sales rep.
We sold memory upgrades and hard drives for Mac Pluses. The hard drives were mostly external 20 and 30 MB SCSI units (that’s megabytes, not gigabytes), but we also made some ultra-high capacity systems which held 185 MB. Many Mac Plus owners were still running from floppies, so a drive that large was almost unimaginable. Generally they were purchased to be shared, using the rudimentary networking software called MacServe, running over AppleTalk cabling.
These drives were quite fast for the day, and I remember vividly being so amazed that it only took two minutes to copy a 1 megabyte file! (Today, I can copy files over my network at about 1200 megabyte per minute; 2500 times faster).
About the time the Mac II was introduced, the owner of Mirror (Joel Ronning) was looking for some way to set us apart from our competition (SuperMac and Jasmine being the two big ones). He found out that we would soon be able to get full-height drives that could hold 340 MB. This gave him the idea of stuffing three of them in one case and marketing it as the world’s first Gigabyte hard drive. He had a prototype made up and christened it the Prostation.
Apple Macintosh II
It was the same size and shape as the Mac II, but because the front panel was cast aluminum instead of plastic, and because it held three full height drives plus a huge power supply, it weighed about 60 pounds. It even had a built in tape drive so you could back up all that data. Unfortunately, it was only a 40 MB tape drive, so it took 25 tapes for a full backup. But it was impressive nevertheless, and looked pretty darn good sitting next to a Mac II.
The sales staff immediately began talking it up to all our key clients, and to our amazement, many were interested in spite of its astronomical price of $24,500. Let me say that again…25 grand for one gigabyte. The last hard drive I bought a couple months ago was a 300 gigabyte that set me back $89. That’s $25,000 per gigabyte versus 29¢ per gigabyte!
I sold the first Prostation system to American Airline operations center in Tulsa. Which means, as far as I’ve been able to determine, I personally sold and installed the first 1 Gigabyte hard drive system ever made for a personal computer.
Note – Sadly, no photos of the Prostation have survived.
awesome man!! imagine how long technology has come!
Could you tell me where I could find a 300Gig hard drive for $89
Dean – It’s so funny that you ask that, because I just came to look at this post and noticed that in the Google ads there was a listing for a 300GB drive for $90. The way Google matches the ads to the content is just amazing. Anyway, the ad points to http://www.tigerdirect.com
Ahhh…Mirror…we probably have a bunch of acquaintances in common. Did you know the guys at Peripheral Technology Group (PTG) and DirectTech? Most people don’t realize what a center of the hard drive universe Mpls. was. At one point, all the CEOs of the major hard drive manufacturers were ex-Control Data guys
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I skipped the MacII, went from the SE30 to the IIfx. Remember that the first external I bought for it cost me something like $4K.
PXLated – Control Data was a powerhouse for a long time. I lived in New Brighton, so they were neighbors.
CDC…They were a big client of mine in their hayday. I worked mostly with headquarters in Bloomington but did make it up to the New Brighton facilities for photo shoots on occasion. Small world.
As I recall, we displayed the prototype ProStation at MacWorld in ‘87 in a plexiglass case. Not letting people play with it because, er… well, the driver to combine the three drives wasn’t working yet. Yet it did say 1 GB in the Finder. Ahem.
Pete – OMG! Great to have you here!
jeez…although in 1987 the closest I had ever come to a hard drive was during a visit to a government building with 2-ton IBM Mainframes hanging around…it´s almost impossible to conceive the 1 gig would cost that much.
I remember the times and the prices well. I remember pricing out what it would cost to take my design studio digital in 1989. I wanted to go direct to press, so that meant outputting my own film (which then still had to be stripped by hand at the printer for multiple plate burns).
As I recall the price tag came to roughly $400,000. It was enough to prompt me to close down my studio a year later, when I had the opportunity to join a prototype publishing group at the National Enquirer. There, I was able to work digitally on one of the earliest production paths that was completely digital from the reporters to the printer.
At least there, I was able to do it on their dime. We used a beta page layou program called Lightspeed, Photoshop 2 and Illustrator 1 on Mac IIfx networked on a GatorBox that crashed hourly.
Wow! saw your name on the laughingsquid blog.
http://laughingsquid.com/2006/01/13/behind-the-scenes-of-steve-jobs-macworld-keynote/
Clicked around a bit and found the 1 gig drive. My hands are not on computers much these days, but they were all over that drive.
Rob Schmitt (Mirror 86-87)