Micropolis had their own problems, but I don't think we should accuse them with out-and-out fraud without researching it a bit further. The company that shipped bricks was Miniscribe, and one of their executives was finally convicted when it was discovered that he'd actually purchased the bricks on his credit card. (Note to self: when buying materials for an inventory scam, pay cash.) I very much doubt that any company records used the phrase "very hard drives", since that wasn't brought up by the prosecution in the trial. Sounds more like a clever phrase a reporter came up with. The true story may never be known, but I don't think any shipped to customers that weren't aware of the plan. Some customers may have agreed to help Miniscribe with their inventory problems (as in lack of), because the customer may have been more interested in the promise of a real drive delivered later than the company going out of business sooner. One of the surplus stores in the Denver area had a brick in their display case with their disk drives; the brink had a sign saying "Miniscribe 40MB". However, it was not an *actual* Miniscribe brick. Miniscribe was acquired by Maxtor and was known for a time as "Maxtor Colorado". The only complaint I had with Micropolis was that their drives had a very high failure rate.

Eric Smith wrote: I have one that I've never had any trouble with. I bought it from some online shop that must have bought a lot of the Micropolis inventory when they went under. It's a 4.3gig 1/2 height 3.5" narrow scsi drive..... don't recall the model numner at the moment. As a PCer I had heard that they made good "server drives", so I bought one when I was building my PC. It's in my IBM 8580 now, although, in storage until I move, probably. Chad Fernandez Michigan, USA

But I liked their floppy drives! Helical lead screw, 48TPI models and 100TPI models (instead of 96TPI) The helical lead screw made it very slow, but quite reliable.