Comments by Tom Gardner on MiniScribe Brick Story

Tom Gardner, treasurer and webmaster at IEEE Silicon Valley History Committee, send us this email following our article History (1989): Unbelievable! Miniscribe Shipped Bricks Rather than HDDs:

I think you have the events of the MiniScribe brick story a bit wrong.
 
Pallets of drive boxes (some empty and some with bricks) were assembled in Singapore and shipped at the end of the year by slow freighter to customers via HQ in CO. The number drive boxes with bricks was calculated so that the pallet weight was correct for the purported number of drives. Since the “drives” shipped before year end they counted as revenue and division manager made his forecast. 

What happened in Colorado was that the “drives” were declared defective and quarantined in a warehouse in Colorado until real drives could be provided. I don’t recall what happened to the bricks, I suspect the “drives” were scrapped in Colorado; I doubt if they were shipped back to Singapore.
 
The fraud was conceived in Singapore by one division manager, an accountant by background, and implemented mainly by the accounting staff with some low level manufacturing workers. AFAIK no engineering and manufacturing management was directly involved.
 
It is not clear how involved was QT Wiles. He ran MiniScribe thru a series of brutal quarterly Dash meetings where division managers who didn’t make their numbers were sometimes fired on the spot.  He paid the division managers quite well. So the pressure was on the Singapore manager to make his numbers which he did with bricks. Wiles is certainly accountable for the atmosphere he created but whether he was actually involved in the brick fraud is unknown. Personally I doubt it.
 
Full disclosure – The above is current recollection from memory of work I did 15 years ago as a potential expert witness in this matter. I read a lot of material but I never gave any testimony.  I never worked for MiniScribe but I do have quite a bit of engineering and manufacturing experience in the disk drive industry.