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Information about M. Farris & Associates

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famicomaster2

Experienced Member
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Feb 3, 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.
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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.
 
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