Maybe these folks have stayed on your radar, but definitely not on mine. I was going to call this "Where are they now?" but the story is more "Behind the Music." Once you know they're alive it's easy enough to track them down, but unless you're really old yourself, somebody really old needs to explain what the big deal is.
Magma was one of the companies we saw as real live heroes back in 1997. This is the year that the Power Mac and its 6 PCI slots gave way to the G3 with, appropriately enough I suppose, 3 PCI slots.
Today, you can do all kinds of video work with no add-in cards at all, but that was still years away. In fact nonlinear editing was pretty new as anything resembling widespread, and we needed expansion cards to make it all work, starting with a mondo-expensive capture card. (Although at the time, a $20,000 edit system was still considered a bargain.)
When the G3 came along, we marvelled at its speed -- 233 Mhz! -- but many of us were literally dead in the water without our extra slots. Magma came to the rescue with an outboard chassis that only took one PCI slot, but held 6 cards inside. Ahhh! Back in business!
[Historical footnote: my brother-in-law was working at Apple at the time. His job in market research led him to discover that, out of 6 slots in the 9600, the average number in use was 1.1. Double that, round up to be safe, and lo and behold, 3 slots was deemed the law of the land. He apologized to me, but hey, Apple was still looking a little shaky. Gotta do what you gotta do.]
As the world comes around again, slots are back in demand, especially when it comes to high-performance applications. (There are some applications, like Pro Tools, for whom the demand for expansion chassis never went away.)
This is a very long lead-up to tell you that Magma is back on the radar with a 1U 7 slot PCIe expansion chassis, ready to go for all you folks ready to build your own blade computing servers. And seriously, for servers, multiple monitors, new Pro Tools systems, etc. Magma has always been all about extending the options for heavy iron computing, and it's great to know they're still at it.
Iomega was another company that hit hard when they hit. Their Zip drives were all the rage -- still the cleverest ad campaign in Mac marketing history (spare me the I'm a Mac bullshoes), backed by the one of best grassroots marketing campaigns in any industry. (Ask your dad about the yellow buttons.)
Not that they needed all that much help making noise. The Zip drive was removable storage offering the capacity of ONE HUNDRED FLOPPY DISKS in a form barely bigger than a couple of floppies stacked.
Did you hear me? ONE HUNDRED FLOPPY DISKS. On one disk. Still takes my breath away. In fact, I'm going to argue that there was nothing that moved the needle this far until we got to DVD storage. CD-Rs were fine, still are. But Zip changed the world of computing in a much bigger way.
Then there was the follow-up to Zip: Jaz. Oops. One gig removable storage, but fragile disks -- look at it funny and it would break. Same with the drive, too. So we had ten times the capacity and ten times the headaches. Buh-bye.
I confess, I had no idea what Iomega was up to until I saw the new eGo drives. Now THESE things are cool looking! And check the size vis a vis the key!
Have to love this, too -- up to 160 GB and still powered by USB!!! It's almost unheard of. (It also supports FW, where self-power in this range is pretty common.) Ain't it cute?
As you poke around the Iomega site, you may be as surprised as I am to find that they've ventured into some relatively serious arrays and other heavy-ish storage...but I'm always going to think tiny storage when I think Iomega, and this one looks like a winner.
Assuming it works more like Zip than Jaz. I'm going to assume it is until I hear otherwise.
Okay, a lot of words for 2 small announcements but hey, there you go.
