32by32 - Macintosh History from the 1980s

FWB Disk Utility

Among those who worked with SCSI hard drives and Macs in the 1980s, one question always came up: Silverlining or FWB? The question was one of disk formatters — which utility did you use to erase new disks, set the interleave for the speed of the SCSI bus on your Mac, and otherwise work with mass storage?

Although by the time I used these programs I associated them with their respective hardware bundlers (FWB and LaCie), apparently at least the FWB utility had its origins in pure software. Or that’s the impression I get from this ad found in a December 1985 copy of MacUser:

Apparently in this stage of the game, the real market was for utilities to break disk-based copy-protection so that users could install programs on their serial hard drives.