Re: Quark QC10 har disk drive

[NetSolstice <tmmaddenNOtmSPAM@umich.edu.invalid>]

I had one of these things years ago on my Macintosh 512k. These
are
so-called 'SmartPort' drives. They aren't SCSI, but rather plug
into the
external floppy port on the Mac. Before the Mac Plus, the only
way to plug
in a hard disk drive was through the floppy port. These drives
were also
compatible wiith the Apple II series (I think that they even
worked with
//c!). There was actually a set of switches on the back to
switch the
controller from Mac-Apple II-Apple ///.

How they were booted was one of the main reasons why they
probabily did
not do so well, IMHO. They shipped with software to boot all
three types of
systems that Quark supported. To boot from the hard disk, the
machine
had to be started up with a boot disk that was created by their
software.
Once the boot disk loaded the drivers into memory, the Quark
took over
and continued the booting process. Worked okay, but you always
needed to
keep that boot disk around. The Mac was particuarily
troublesome. The
software stopped working after System 5. I had to hack my copy
to get it
to boot System 6 (forget about System 7). It would also take
forever,
mainly due to the fact that you were actually doing two boots.

The Quark QC-10 cost around $3000 (if I remember correctly- it
was 1985
for pete's sake!). Luckily, mine was provided for me and I
didn't have to pay
for it. :-) There was also a QC-20, but that was considerably
more
expensive. Quark probabily had a hard time marketing these
drives because
there were other Mac drives such as Apple HD-20 (non-SC version)
that
hooked up in the same way, but did not need the seperate boot
disk.

That's all I have. Before you ask, I don't have any of the Apple
II utilities
that came with the drive. Those are long gone. I don't have the
Mac stuff
with me right now. It's 4000 miles away in storage.

Good luck!

-Tom



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