SIMH images to Zip Disks

Zane H. Healy wrote: I was the third engineer hired at one of the first DVR companies. The one most people have NOT heard of, though we shipped our first product the same week as the more famous one, and IMNSHO ours was better in many ways. We had >99% failure rate on hundreds of the Syquest drives (mix of Syjet and Sparq). MTBF was somewhere under 2 weeks. Many failed on the first day of use. We had people returning failed drives to Fry's on a daily basis. I had recommended that we use the ATAPI ZIP drive as the boot device for software development, and an ordinary hard drive to store the MPEG files. The ZIP drive worked quite reliably, but wasn't big enough for the MPEG files. There was no reason that the MPEG files needed to be on removeable media, even during development. However, someone in management thought that it was a better idea to have a single removable media drive. That was arguably the second dumbest technical decision made during development, and it wasted hundreds of man hours. The dumbest was that the software developers wanted an Ethernet port for debug use, which didn't need to be stuffed for production. (This was well before the whole-house sharing idea was given serious consideration as a product feature.) The hardware engineer said that it would add an extra two days to the hardware schedule, so management killed it. The software developers said that having the Ethernet port would have shaved weeks off the software schedule, but apparently management didn't believe it. On the other hand, management insisted that the hardware engineer put a 1394 port in the product, while they didn't budget any time for software or even testing. The product shipped with the 1394 port, which actually never worked. Years later I saw Matt Blaze wearing a T-shirt with this company logo: http://blog.ontrac.com/Portals/53780/images/waste-management-logo.jpg He explained that the reason he wore the shirt was that the company name was a complete sentence. Really made me wish I'd had that shirt back when I'd worked at the DVR company.