Portability had become a priority for several companies in the early '80s, but the 'comfort factor' wasn't very polished, to say the least. While computers averaged 13 kilograms in weight, the folks at Maynard Electronics decided to offer the possibility of moving only their content thanks to a hard drive compact enough to carry on the shoulder. Its capacity was an impressive 20 megabytes in the largest model, and the user had to meet several technical requirements before using it.
My first hard drive had a maximum capacity of 40 megabytes, but it wasn't much bigger than current drives. I estimate it was twice the average height, and it celebrated a real carnival when reading or writing data. Despite those limitations in space, performance and noise, I'm convinced that I entered the world of hard drives in one of its best moments, with greater availability for home users. High-density magnetic storage had ceased to be a corporate privilege, but there were still some luxuries limited to offices. One of them was called Transport, a portable hard drive developed by Maynard Electronics.
A Portable Hard Drive in 1985
An article published by InfoWorld magazine (link below) in May 1986 explains that the hard drive had two variants, Transport 10 and Transport 20, both numbers indicating their capacity. Its total weight was 3.17 kilograms, with dimensions of 36.5 by 14.9 by 8.57 centimeters. In the case of PC XT computers, the Transport required the installation of a dedicated controller (one was already included in the package), while on AT systems it could work with the internal hardware available. On the software side, versions 2.0 and 2.1 of MS-DOS needed a special patch that extended compatibility to 20-megabyte disks (16 MB was the original limit), and when it was time to move the disk, the user could not forget to run the parking or head-parking routine, using the official Maynard program.
Maynard Electronics offered a five-year warranty on the Transport 20, but the company didn't last that long. It was acquired by Archive Corp in 1986, which in turn passed to Conner Peripherals in 1993, to end up under Seagate's wing in 1996. What was the price of this monster? $1,325 in 1985-86 ($3,800 adjusted for inflation), with a secondary payment of $355 ($1,017) for each secondary controller.
Sources: Paleofuture and InfoWorld on Google Books.
