The Miniscribe Fiasco punctuated the end of the silver age of personal computing. It was one of the last things mentioned in the final issue of Micro Cornucopia.

I've owned several Maxtor hard drives in the past and they were great drives, faster than hell, and lasted like 10 years without failure with chain smoking and hitting the computer when you got pissed at a game they didn't screw up. They did have a little quirk though your drive size was measure in 1000 not 1024 so they were finicky and you learned a lot when using partitions on one of them and they suddenly were overfull.

Schliebaum, Reifenberg (rifenburgh) fuckin jews

Very interesting! Thanks for the post

tl; dw:

Consider what happened with MiniScribe hard drives. According to news accounts from the time, MiniScribe ran into a financing problem. The company needed money to make more hard drives, but no one was lending to them.

MiniScribe didn’t have hard drives to fulfill orders, but they decided to take orders anyway. That way they could collect money and deal with their financing challenges.

The drives that would fill the orders would be serialized units that would sit uninspected at a warehouse in Singapore for a while. That presented MiniScribe with their fraudulent opportunity: After collecting payment, MiniScribe planned to recall all the sold units by serial number while they remained in the warehouse. The hope was that this plan would give them enough time to turn the money from orders into real hard drives.

In the meanwhile, they just needed something to put into all those boxes that would go to the warehouse to later be recalled. I think you can guess what they used!

A Wikipedia editor delivered the punchline with great dryness: “The decision was made to ship pieces of masonry inside the boxes that would normally contain hard drives.”

That’s right — bricks! You opened those hard drive boxes and you got bricks. Before they actually resorted to “pieces of masonry,” they were placing nonfunctional, obsolete or broken drives in the boxes. But it was the bricks that really captured headlines and imaginations.

The scheme evidently fell apart because MiniScribe was simultaneously laying off workers and going through all sorts of other trouble. Among those laid off were staffers in charge of shipping and warehousing. As soon as they were let go, they told the press about the bricks inside the hard drive boxes. The stories hit just before the holiday season. MiniScribe went bankrupt as huge accounting scandals unraveled and what assets remained were later bought by Maxtor (makers of the famous musical hard drives, who are also now out of business).

So basically, they had people pre-paying for drives but needed to pretend that the drives were already there, ready to ship.