It still works!

An ancient hard drive! This circa 1990 44MB Western Digital drive uses a stepper motor (instead of the common voice coil actuator these days) and is a true IDE drive! While looking at it, the guy said "You can have it free, I don't want it anymore." So of course I took it home, just to solve the mystery... what the hell is on it?

I dragged out my old 486 and plugged it in. Upon startup, it started making a disturbing chunk chunk chunk sound. Uhoh, the drive is dead. I guess it was a waste of time to take it home. But then I remembered that you had to set the drive parameters in the BIOS on these old machines, so I went into the BIOS and set them. Saved the settings, and WHAM! It booted!

It had DOS 5.0 installed, which is about right for the early 90s. There were several old applications installed, including something called "MAC", which allows you to view ancient black and white porn!

There was also APRS, a ham radio packet application, and Crossword Creator, which allows you to create and solve crossword puzzles.

A barebones Windows 3.1 install was also present; nothing interesting was installed there. It was worth the fun of plugging this old sucker in and seeing what was on it, though. I'm probably going to hang onto it; working hard drives from the ancient era of 1990 are usually hard to come by!

So if you ever see old IDE drives at a flea market or hamfest, pick'em up! You never know what sort of weird stuff may be hanging out on them. }:)