Thanks to my coffee, this nearly self-destructed my keyboard

[major_clanger]

This story on The Register about a solid-state drive with inbuilt self destruct elicited this wonderful comment:

Self Destructing Drive?

Sir Clive Sinclair got there years ago with the Microdrive.

Should your data fall into enemy hands, the Microdrive cartridge would instantly be rendered unreadable. In fact if it fell into anyones hands, including your own, it was also unreadable.

Comments

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Ooh, harsh...


(Mind you, how many did they actually sell? Typical Sinclair idea to develop something proprietary when there is already a perfectly good and reliable industry standard out there (the floppy disk.)

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Quite a few, I think - they were sold in fairly large quantities for a while, remember that floppy drives were big and expensive then.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

Bear in mind Sinclair's ethos, which was to look at a product niche and find an innovative but as-cheap-as-possible way of filling it. The Microdrive was ingenious in what it did, but you got what you paid for.

[zotz]

They weren't that bad. I never had any problems with mine.

[zotz]

And also, haven't ATA drives had a bios-update feature for years that can be misused as a disk-to-brick command?

[pauldormer.livejournal.com]

Don't recall ever having much trouble with my microdrives, either, but after a couple of years, you could plug a disc drive into the QL and I stopped using the microdrive.

I do recall a letter in the Ask the Experts column in QL Users magazine where someone said that as they had fitted a disc drive and stored their QL on a narrow shelf, to save space they'd taked a hacksaw and removed the microdrives and now their QL had stopped working, did anyony know why? The experts couldn't decide whether this letter was serious or a spoof.

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

Coffee meet keyboard...

Even better than the self destroying microdrives!

[murphys-lawyer.livejournal.com]

I had a brace of microdrives for my Spectrum, and out of 30-40 cartridges only one died in harness (three were stillborn and never initialised, but that's different).

Combined with a Multiface One, they served me faithfully for many years, and were only retired when I got bitten by the desktop publishing bug and upgraded to an Atari ST.

As for the USB stick with the red button, I can only think of this.