Bernoulli Box Max BM105 Cartridge

[Iesca]

Out of curiosity, does anyone happen to have one of these rare 5MB Bernoulli Cartridges they can post photos of? I have pics of the drive itself, but the cartridges seem to be completely missing from the internet apart from some ads from old magazines.

The 5MB carts are physically different from the 10 and 20MB carts, and according to a brochure are a bit smaller (but still rectangular).

 

[splorp]

I only have the 5.25" Bernoulli cartridges (and drives) in my collection, but I do know a couple of people with 8" cartridges. I’ll check with them to see what capacity disks they have.

… and according to a brochure are a bit smaller …

Can you share a link (or scan) of the brochure you’re referring to?

 

[Iesca]

Happily! This was posted for sale on ebay at some point, it may even still be there, but it was interesting enough to save the images posted. In fact I'll post both this and a brochure for the "standard" Bernoulli box which used the 11-inch cartridges. No interior on that one, sadly, but we do get the stats on the back. As you can see, the original 10MB cartridges (and the later 20MB ones) are 0.71 x 8.23 x 11.02 inches, whereas the 5MB Macintosh cartridges (which got their own unique drive due to Macs not having SCSI at that time) had 0.53 x 5.5 x 7.4 inch cartridges, so not-insignificantly smaller. But other than some grainy magazine ads, I have yet to see any actual photos of the cartridges. I've attached an example which is probably the best I've found so far.

Of course, once the Plus came out, Macs came with SCSI standard, and they discontinued the B105 Mac version of the Bernoulli drive and just adapted the original 10 and 20 MB drives for the Mac (they originally used a weird 37-pin D-Sub and a custom SCSI adapter card for PCs.)

EDIT: My guess (and it's just a guess) as to why they gave Macs a smaller cartridge size of only 5MB is probably to do with the pretty significant limitations of the original Macintosh File System, which from what I have read starts to really choke with large numbers of files. By the time Macs got SCSI, HFS had been released, and so it was much less of a problem than it had been previously. (Early serial-based HDDs like the GCC HyperDrive encouraged users to partition their drives into multiple volumes, even with the drives themselves only being 10-20MB apiece, in order to get around MFS's limitations in that regard.)

 

[splorp]

Thank you! These are very interesting details.

By the way, one of my contacts sent me a link to this review of the Macintosh Bernoulli Box from the July 29th, 1985 issue of InfoWorld. Not sure if this provides any additional information or not.

InfoWorld

InfoWorld is targeted to Senior IT professionals. Content is segmented into Channels and Topic Centers. InfoWorld also celebrates people, companies, and projects.

books.google.co.uk

 

[Iesca]

Thank you so much. I'm mostly just looking for modern photos of the cartridges at this point, but I will definitely read this with interest!

EDIT: I've attached a screenshot of the review for others to enjoy. A copy of the software for this original Macintosh Bernoulli Box is actually on the Garden here. Interestingly, this version from 1986 has a backup program ("BoxBack") which the reviewer noted was something that was missing from the version from 1985.

 

[Iesca]

Some photos of the drive that I've collected from ebay and elsewhere.

An original B105 Mac, as seen in the review (note the two serial ports, one of which is apparently inactive in this version), found via worthpoint:



A presumably later version, rebadged as a "Bernoulli Box 5", to fit in with their other nomenclature at the time (Bernoulli Box 10, Bernoulli Box 20, Bernoulli Box 10+10, etc.), from an ebay listing early 2025: