I don’t have a massive amount to say about this, except for, DAMN.
This is a 20MB hard drive. I’m talking a couple of songs, unless you’re a hipster, then one FLAC. Maybe one or two good RAW pictures, and that’s assuming you have another disk with the OS on it already.
Let me know when you noticed the SD Card in the pictures for scale.
Defect Map: Right from the factory, they knew that 1980’s spinning disks were not great, so they left the factory with a tattoo saying what was wrong with it. On this disk, it was only six bytes… But wild to think they were like “Yeah, it had problems, so lets make the entire sticker about that and cover the drive and ship it anyways”
I’m just including this shot so eBay sellers can steal my image to represent their items.
Check out that card edge connector — and the white set of switches with a red outline. Back then, you didn’t have a “Smart Wizard”, unless you were talking about the Wizard of Oz (which came out ~ 40 years prior), no BIOS config screen, no utility. You’d get out a screw driver, pull the drive, and flip some physical bits to set up your system. IRQ? DMA? What?
And because that board on the top wasn’t enough, in the armpit of the drive is some additional silicon, doing who knows what.
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