In Q4 of 1994, I bought a 9gig Micropolis HDD1991 for $3,500. The 4gig models were selling for far less. I bought it from EISI who were one of the big VAR/dealers at the time.
I became friends with many on the Micropolis team and have remained so to this day. Yes, they may have been a bullet to be dodged but using the 1991, I did online broadcast finish quality video that ended up on the BBC and elsewhere and came off a single drive, striped across three 3gig partitions as I recall.
A friend of mine at the time, Barry Silver (who was then working on Viacom's Blues Clues and would later invent
Slingshot), was using a single 9gig Micropolis 1991 drive with his Media 100, After Effects, Elastic Reality and Infini-D to create the first couple of seasons of Blues Clues that way.
The original Micropolis team would later found and build Med�a hard drives and again change the market. Unlike many, I loved Micropolis and they only became anethema when Singapore Technologies bought them and didn't have the resources to keep building the company and honoring warranty claims.
It was the wild west and even Charles McConathy once told me that Micropolis let many people do video that wouldn't have been able to afford it using other drives. The "AV Rated" drives of Micropolis needed to be shipped with fire extinguishers as standard equipment but they pushed the technology into areas where others were then afraid to go. They sold for a bit more than their competitors but did with a single drive what my Avid and other friends had to get multiple drives to accomplish.
Just to give an alternate view of Micropolis.
Best regards,
Ron Lindeboom
Remember: Burt Bacharach lied. What the world
really needs now is an undo button.
