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Build Your Own

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Back when hard disk drives were rare and a First Class Peripherals Sider 10 MB hard drive sold for $999.00, I decided that I no longer wanted to pay that kind of price when my friends in the PC world were paying but a fraction of that price for their hard drives.  The result was a public domain article I wrote back around 1988 on building your own "vanilla hard drive".  Of course, I quickly became tired of manually backing it up to 3.5 floppy disks, and so the "vanilla tape drive" backup system was developed, which I believe, was the very first tape backup system for the Apple II line of computers.  A friend of mine - Tim Grams from Texas - wrote the necessary software for the Vanilla Tape Backup System.  These are some files relating to that experience.

Click on the PDF file you would like to view/download. ♥ indicates an original A2OL high-definition PDF.


Vanilla Hard Drive

Vanilla Tape Drive

HD Conference Proceedings

♥ How to Crimp              

Vanilla Hard Drive Follow-up

Do-It-Yourself FAQ on Disk Drives