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Information about M. Farris & Associates

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famicomaster2

Experienced Member
Joined
Feb 2, 2017
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Southeastern US
Hello, many years ago, when I first started my collection of disk drives, I stumbled across "M. Farris & Associates," which was a website with what seemed to be many bogus models of disk drives, which I mostly disregarded. Recently, I've confirmed the existence of a few of the really insane items they listed - Makes me think the rest of their list was actually real, and in retrospect it was extremely arrogant of 14 year old me to think they would just lie about models they serviced.

It looks like they probably went out of business in about 2011, and sometime in the last year or so, their website finally went down.

I was curious whether or not anyone had any experience with this company before they shut their doors, or had any further documentation of things on their site. I would love to someday see or even own much of the equipment they listed parts and spares for.
 
famicomaster2 said:
Hello, many years ago, when I first started my collection of disk drives, I stumbled across "M. Farris & Associates," which was a website with what seemed to be many bogus models of disk drives, which I mostly disregarded. Recently, I've confirmed the existence of a few of the really insane items they listed - Makes me think the rest of their list was actually real, and in retrospect it was extremely arrogant of 14 year old me to think they would just lie about models they serviced.
Click to expand...

Was it the sheer number of brand names (plenty of which look a little goofy today) that threw you? Back in the late 70's up through the middle-late 80's pretty much everyone in California with access to a decent machine shop and a few bucks to spare on setting up a minimal clean room got into the hard disk business. I mean, sure, you browse their catalog and you might assume that a "1776 Patrick Henry I" couldn't possibly be a real thing, but you'd be wrong, here's the trademark registration.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
Was it the sheer number of brand names (plenty of which look a little goofy today) that threw you? Back in the late 70's up through the middle-late 80's pretty much everyone in California with access to a decent machine shop and a few bucks to spare on setting up a minimal clean room got into the hard disk business. I mean, sure, you browse their catalog and you might assume that a "1776 Patrick Henry I" couldn't possibly be a real thing, but you'd be wrong, here's the trademark registration.
Click to expand...
No, I'm well aware of most of the strange manufacturers, but the goofy ones (Like 1776!) are what threw me for a total loop. I actually found that exact resource, showing that companies had actually filed for patents and copyrights on these names, meaning that they must be real!

It's caused me to massively expand my bounty list for my hard drive collection, including those 1776 drives like the Tom Paine and Patrick Henry!

I'd really love to see photos of them if any still exist, and I'd pay far too much money to own many of them.
 
It's a crying shame there aren't good online archives of "Computer Shopper" magazine from the 80's and 90's. I would wager you could probably find at least a mention of everything on that website buried in the ads of Computer Shopper from that period. There were these data recovery outfits that had these huge ads listing hundreds of different makes of models of drives that not only could they recover data off of, they could sell you refurbished oddball drives just in case you needed an exact replacement for some mission critical application...

Not that that would help you much in trying to *acquire* one, of course. I'm sure any surviving data recovery firms from that period must have emptied that crud out of their warehouses by now.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
Not that that would help you much in trying to *acquire* one, of course. I'm sure any surviving data recovery firms from that period must have emptied that crud out of their warehouses by now.
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Indeed. I've found a company out West who buys warehouses of old equipment and resells it, and that's where I've gotten a lot of my weirdos from over the years, like both of my Epson drives, my Kalok cartridge system, etc.

I've been using the CSC Hard Drive Bible as a checklist, but it doesn't even include many of the brands and models shown on M. Farris. I would love to document these models in some way eventually.
 
famicomaster2 said:
Hello, many years ago, when I first started my collection of disk drives, I stumbled across "M. Farris & Associates," which was a website with what seemed to be many bogus models of disk drives, which I mostly disregarded. Recently, I've confirmed the existence of a few of the really insane items they listed - Makes me think the rest of their list was actually real, and in retrospect it was extremely arrogant of 14 year old me to think they would just lie about models they serviced.

It looks like they probably went out of business in about 2011, and sometime in the last year or so, their website finally went down.

I was curious whether or not anyone had any experience with this company before they shut their doors, or had any further documentation of things on their site. I would love to someday see or even own much of the equipment they listed parts and spares for.
Click to expand...

I just came across this. I used to do the website design along with the late Erv Fleckstein in Mark's office in Marina Del Rey, CA. He in fact did service those drives listed.

The big niche that he had was government contracts. We would get a lot of drives from ships in the middle of the ocean, the Pentagon, NASA, etc. for repair. When there's a contract in place, companies can't just up and replace a 40GB RLL or 20GB MFM drive for a 60GB IDE.

So when the drives failed (platters, bearings, etc.), they would send to Mark. He would service the drive(s), then send them back out to the sender. Usual turnaround time was about 5 business days from time it came through the door, until the time UPS picked it up.

I still remember Mark's answering machine...

"Thank you for calling M. Farris and Associates. I'm sorry I can't take your call, but please leave a message, and I will call you back."
 
Webmaster Chuck said:
I just came across this. I used to do the website design along with the late Erv Fleckstein in Mark's office in Marina Del Rey, CA. He in fact did service those drives listed.

The big niche that he had was government contracts. We would get a lot of drives from ships in the middle of the ocean, the Pentagon, NASA, etc. for repair. When there's a contract in place, companies can't just up and replace a 40GB RLL or 20GB MFM drive for a 60GB IDE.

So when the drives failed (platters, bearings, etc.), they would send to Mark. He would service the drive(s), then send them back out to the sender. Usual turnaround time was about 5 business days from time it came through the door, until the time UPS picked it up.

I still remember Mark's answering machine...

"Thank you for calling M. Farris and Associates. I'm sorry I can't take your call, but please leave a message, and I will call you back."
Click to expand...
Thanks for the info!
I have no doubts he serviced those drives at one point in time, and I'm sure you meant megabytes instead of gigabytes, but I was moreso curious if there was ever active inventory of such drives, and what happened to them after the shutdown.
 
Same MO for Crisis Computer in San Jose for obsolete HP gear. They had a huge warehouse of stuff including servo track writers.
They lived off of government system support. They shut down in the 00s and many Bay Area hobbyists made a dent into what they
were scrapping. I would really be interested in what Farris had for documentation but I'm shure that hit the dumpster a decade ago.

I also remember visiting a place in the 00s near Chatsworth that was maintaining Pertec tape and disk drives. They had Gaylords
of Pertec documentation but they still wanted real money for them.
 
famicomaster2 said:
Thanks for the info!
I have no doubts he serviced those drives at one point in time, and I'm sure you meant megabytes instead of gigabytes, but I was moreso curious if there was ever active inventory of such drives, and what happened to them after the shutdown.
Click to expand...
Yes I did mean MB instead of GB. My apologies. ;-)

And yes, he did have a lot of stock in what was listed on hand. ST-251's, MS8425's, IBM 350 (this one was primarily for shits and giggles), etc. And any of the intricate parts (resistors, stepper motors, platters, etc.) were housed in a cabinet that spanned probably 8' long by about 5' tall.

He also had a HUGE degausser in the office as well. Also had the capabilities to read Data8 and Univac MTU's right there in the office.
 
Webmaster Chuck said:
And yes, he did have a lot of stock in what was listed on hand. ST-251's, MS8425's, IBM 350 (this one was primarily for shits and giggles), etc. And any of the intricate parts (resistors, stepper motors, platters, etc.) were housed in a cabinet that spanned probably 8' long by about 5' tall.
Click to expand...
Well yeah, I figured on the ST-251s and 8425s, even I have a few dozen of each. IBM 350, like a RAMAC or something else? Presumably just the mechanical section of RAMAC, if I had to guess, and not a whole machine. I hope that went to a collector or museum, either way.

The curiosity was more with the strange drives he listed - Like "1776 Electronics," JCT, Ye-Data, Memorex, etc.
 
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