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Comment by par | Hacker News Reader

Really miss stuff like this from back in the early computing days. One time we used MS Backup to copy Warcraft 1 from my friends computer to my own. Took like 80 floppy disks!

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That sounds like you copied the CD version via a floppy disk?

It would have probably been faster to put your friends hard disk into your computer for a few minutes and copy directly from disk to disk?

Disk2Disk

It’s the computer version of frottage

remember laplink?

I remember interlnk. It seemed like magic the first time I used it.

haven't thought of that program in decades, thank you. First time I learned about a null modem cable and just scraping the surface of RS-232. I also remember using crossover cables so I could network 2 computers on a high-schooler's budget.

Ideally with the parallel cable.

> It would have probably been faster to put your friends hard disk into your computer for a few minutes and copy directly from disk to disk?

Did ever your hard drive died because you shut down your computer cleanly, discharged static electricity, removed the disk without jolting it, and installed to another computer with the same care?

I lost a couple of drives that way.

Remember the days before auto park? You would have to tell the drive to safely park the head before you could move it.

I was probably too young to remember these days, however probably a couple of my disks didn't have the feature. The disks I lost were 6GiB and 30GiB models, both were autoparking.

The park thing happened before the GB era of the hard drives

I started with a 119MB Samsung, on a computer with a BIOS supporting custom low-level formatting of the drive according to CYL/SEC/HEAD parameters.

It was mostly only ST-506 MFM and RLL drives, almost everything parked automatically by the time IDE drives passed the 100MB size.

Indeed, plus the jumper switches for master/slave mode

I never had enough jumpers at the time(early in my computer explorations), and hoarded them like gold up until around 2007 or 2008 when I finally had plenty from old spare parts.

Meh. We had a PC in the electronics lab circa 1990 that ran perfectly happily with no case on either the PC or the hard-drive - spinning platters exposed.

Well, in 90s things went from happy to snappy in an instant randomly. Yours beating Murphy that consistently tells me that it's a very lucky system.

Maybe blessed by a Polish Priest? [0]

[0]: https://polishpriests.tumblr.com/

we were definitely a bit too young to have thought of that :)

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