Happy Computers

Happy Computers (HCI) was a small company producing disk drive enhancements for the Atari 8-bit and Atari ST computer families. Happy Computers is most noted for the add-in boards for the Atari 810 and Atari 1050 disk drives, which achieved a tremendous speed improvement for reading and writing, and for the ability to "back up" floppies. Happy's products were among the most popular Atari computer add-ons. They are still in use and active in the aftermarket today.
History
Happy Computers was formed in 1982 by Richard Adams under the name Happy Computing. At that time, the 810 Happy was hand wired on the internal side board. The name was changed to Happy Computers or HCI in 1983 when the company went from a sole proprietorship to a corporation.
HCI stopped shipping these products in 1990, and since then many other Atari enthusiasts have reverse engineered and replicated the products because they were so popular and fun.
By 1986 software companies began producing fewer titles for the Atari than for the Apple II series or Commodore 64. They attributed this to their belief that an unusually high amount of software piracy existed on the Atari, and cited Happy Drive as a major cause of the piracy.
Atari 8-bit products
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The Discovery Cartridge was a device that plugged into the cartridge slot of the Atari ST Computer.
It backed up floppies and had connectors to allow a 3rd and 4th drive to be hooked up. The original ST computer only allowed for two floppy drives, and the extra drives were handy.
There were 4 different options available. Options included a pass through for another cartridge, a switch to bank select larger cartridges, and a switch to select/deselect the extra drives. There was also a battery backed up Time of Day clock option in the Discovery Cartridge, a significant oversight the Atari ST lacked in the stock configuration.
The power of the "HART" chip (Happy Atari Rotating Thing), designed by Richard Adams, allowed standard Atari drives to read the unusual Macintosh variable speed disks without needing a variable speed drive. The disks were then re-written in a standard "constant speed" 3.5 inch compatible format called Magic format. This allowed using the various Mac emulator products that would run most efficiently with Magic format disks. At least one of the Macintosh emulators also had a circuit to read Mac disks, but could make the emulations slower and less reliable. It was faster and more efficient to convert Mac disks to Magic format first.
The HART chip (IC number HARTD1©87HCI) also allowed copying conventional ST disks much faster. The computer floppy controller required two passes per track, three with verification. The HART chip could format and write in the same pass, saving one pass per track.
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This was a smaller version of The Discovery Cartridge that plugged into the Atari ST cartridge slot and had a cable for 1 drive that allowed converting Mac disks.

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