Windows 10: Got a dead external USB drive? Drive may still be good!

Well, shoot. If we're going for one upsmanship (downsmanship?) the first PC that I owned was a 128k toaster Mac, purchased in October of 1984, plus an external single sided 3 1/2"400k floppy drive and an Imagewriter dot matrix printer (made by C. Itoh). I haven't yet forgiven Steve Jobs for going to market with such a worthless toy. (The 512k Fat Mac was actually usable.) I didn't go over to the Dark Side until 1995. All of my PCs have been homebuilt since 1997. It's amazing how little you need to know to slap a PC together and get it up and running with modern Windows (95, 98, NT, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10).

On the work-related side, things go back further. IBM 2741 terminals communicating with an IBM 360/370 at less than 150 baud to run APL. Hollerith cards read at an RBT for a CDC 6400 (later a Cyber 175). Switching to a 300 baud link from a VDT to a DEC 10 to submit jobs to the same Cyber 175. Dumb terminals connected to a VAX 8600. Sun Sparc 10 Model 30 Unix (Solaris) workstation. Brief use of a Cray Y MP to run some specialized Fortran code. Stone knives and bearskins. (Can you ID the Star Trek TOS episode?)

 

OK you beat me! This was because I got my first computer at Secondary school in 1991. My parents wouldn't buy me a computer earlier (1985) because I would play all day and not study! I remember in late '80s some of my friends had Spectrum ZX 128KB with a tape recorder. I was then gathering some Spectrum cassettes to play when I would buy my own computer. When time came, in Christmas 1991 I finally bought a PC! Fortunately the shop gave me a 360KB 5.25" floppy with some games to play and then I had some of my friends. Before my first computer I had a pod clone (the Atari game with the two vertical lines playing tennis and other games) which I connected to the TV, but that doesn't count. A friend of mine remembers having computers with punch cards at school...

Younger posters probably read these and think now I must be an old geek, well not that old! I'm not even 40 yet. *Smile

 

I consider you a youngster, I was 30 and long graduated college before I bought my first PC in 1984.

 

No Trekkies here?

"The City on the Edge of Forever", written by Harlan Ellison.