Design concepts Conner's drives were notable for eschewing the "tub" type of head-disk assembly, where the disks are inside a large base casting shaped like a square
bowl or
vault with a flat lid; instead, they preferred the flat base plate approach, which was more resistant to
shock and less likely to warp or deform when heated. Their first drives had the base plate carrying the disks, head arm and actuator enclosed inside a long aluminum cartridge, fixed to a bulkhead on the other side with two screws and sealed with a large, square
O-ring. This design would be Conner's trademark look well into the 1990s. Logically, Conner's drives had some of the characteristics of the original
MiniScribe drives (of which John Squires had also been a designer), with a large amount of intelligence built into the drive's
central processing unit (CPU); Conner drives used a single
Motorola 68HC11 microcontroller, and ran a proprietary
real-time operating system that implemented the track-following algorithms (the
"servo" system) in software, as well as managing the bus interface. ==Corporate history==