Macintosh External Disk Drive (400K)

The original Macintosh External Disk Drive (M0130) was introduced with the Macintosh on January 24, 1984. However, it did not actually ship until May 4, 1984, sixty days after Apple had promised it to dealers. Bill Fernandez was the project manager who oversaw the design and production of the drive.The drive case was designed to match the Macintosh and included the same 400K drive installed inside the Macintosh. Although very similar to the 400K drive which newly replaced Apple's ill-fated Twiggy drive in the Lisa, there were subtle differences relating mainly to the eject mechanism. However, all of these drives were labeled confusingly identically. The Macintosh could only support one external drive, limiting the number of floppy disks mounted at once to two. However, both Apple and third party manufacturers developed external hard drives that connected to the Mac's floppy disk port, which had pass-through ports to accommodate daisy-chaining the external disk drive. Apple's Hard Disk 20 could accommodate an additional daisy-chained hard drive as well as an external floppy disk.