I was cleaning up my desk in the office earlier this week and realized that the speakers I was using were actually from the very first serious computer I ever owned. It was a generic beige box my parents got for me used at a repair shop in a college town. No doubt some student’s old machine. The original CRT monitor it came with didn’t work, but my mom found a replacement. It had Windows 98, a very finicky CD-ROM drive, a 3.5GB hard drive and a god-only-knows CPU.
It was the computer on which I learned to program. I was mostly self-taught at the time. This was back in 2002. I don’t remember how exactly the machine died. Looking back on it, and having more experience with computer repair now, it was probably the power supply. I remember it no longer working after a storm. A surge was unlikely, but old power supplies like that do tend to fail.
So here I was, feeling all nostalgic for this old machine when I remembered that actually, I still had the original hard drive kicking around in a drawer in my apartment. Would it still work? What was on it? I don’t think I’ve ever thrown out a hard drive. I always keep them. As long as they’re not failed, I keep them.
What does a 10+ year old hard drive look like? Surprisingly similar to modern 3.5-inch drives. Same form factor at least, and a sticker indicating it’s nearly 3000 times smaller in capacity. The bigger question was would it spin up and would my 2014 Macbook Air be able to read from it? Amazingly after cobbling together my one parallel ATA connector and plugging the USB end into my Air, the drive spun up. It was very noisey, both the spinning and the head, but it was spinning. After a while, the drive finally mounted and I was able to browse around it. Color me impressed. I’m not sure what the original file system was. It was probably FAT32, but I don’t actually know for sure. OSX El Capitan had no problem reading it though.
It was mostly a fun nostalgia trip. I didn’t have much on that computer. There were some early programs I had written, but I have almost no idea how to get them off and running again. To better preserve the data, I copied the entire contents of the drive to my Air. Maybe someday I’ll decide to tackle building a Windows 98 virtual machine to really kick nostalgia into overdrive. Though I already have a PowerBook 180c I’m trying to get running.