Sometimes a Floppy is Not Enough

Hard disks for microcomputers were just starting to come on the scene when I exited Apple for the dark side of a PC clone and a copy of MS DOS. Over the almost thirty years since then the price has declined from around $20,000 for a 5 MB drive to less than $100 for over .5 TB. Along with this decrease in price has also come an increase in reliability and access speed. Given those circumstances, I am not a purist to the extent of demanding a hard disk originally intended for an 8-bit Apple. Plus, I have lost hard disks that were less than a year old. I could not imagine depending upon a hard disk 25 or more years old. Thankfully, I do not have to rely on one.

Current companies have developed an IDE adapter that fits the original Apple expansion bus. Other bright people have combined this type adapter with a Compact Flash (CF) memory cardholder allowing the CF card to be a solid-state hard disk. After a bit of research I selected the MicroDrive from ReactiveMicro of New Jersey (http://www.reactivemicro.com/). At $135, it includes all I needed to restart in Apple computing.

Beyond the essential hardware (including a 128 MB CF card yielding four 32 MB Apple ProDOS hard disks and a USB CF adapter for using the CF card on a PC or Mac), Henry Courbis of ReactiveMicro preloads all four hard disks with preformatted disk images. While disks 3 and 4 are empty and ready for anything you may want to put there (mine are still empty), disk 2 has Glen Bredon’s DOS.MASTER preinstalled to allow you to use DOS 3.3 applications within an Apple ProDOS hard disk. Disk 1 is already formatted with the final ProDOS release and many critical utilities. Among those utilities are:

- MicroDrive Utilities
- ShrinkIt
- CopyIIPlus
- DiskMaker 8
- Disk2File

Also included is a 5.25” flip floppy to get you started as well as a CD with additional documentation and utilities such as Andy McFadden’s Windows based CiderPress file manager.

Since the Apple nominally boots from the highest slot number to the lowest, I put the MicroDrive in slot 7, turned on the power, and grinned from ear-to-ear.