this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2025
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Programmer Humor

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Feel old yet? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 4 days ago by cm0002@piefed.world to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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[–] leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Meh, burning CDs... ever had to worry whether you'd parked your hard drive's heads before moving it, child..?

(To be fair, neither did I, probably; my earliest hard drive was already IDE, I believe, and those seem to have already had autopark, but the old lore was that you parked your hard drives before moving them, or the heads would scratch the surface, so park them we did.)

[–] sylver_dragon@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

ever had to worry whether you’d parked your hard drive’s heads before moving it, child…?

Yes, also you parked it before shutting down the system every time. Once the hard drive was powered down, the heads would just crash into the platters. While not instantly fatal, it wasn't good for the drive. So, you'd park the drive before flipping the power switch.

[–] HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Ever have a hard drive with the head stepper motor visible outside?

[–] leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Not that I recall, no.

My first one was a 65MB (or was it 85MB?) 3.5'' parallel ATA one, and while the enclosure might have been shaped around the platter(s?) (could have been a later one, though) I don't recall the motor being distinguishable.

Whole machine (my first PC proper) was a 286, 16MHz with turbo on, possibly 1024KB of RAM (I recall setting up autoexec.bat to ask me if I needed extended or expanded memory on boot, but could've been in a later machine; pretty certain the memory was on socketed DIPs on the mainboard, not SIMMs, in any case, so it can't have been much, and 640KB was supposed to be enough, anyway), CGA, 5.25'' and possibly 3.5'' floppy drive, DOS... 4.something, I believe.

Good times.