Chapter 20. Replacing the Hard Drive

When I bought my first computer back in the mid-80s, its storage features were limited to a single 5.25-inch floppy drive. Yup, there was no hard drive in sight. If I wanted to run a program, I’d insert its disk into the floppy drive and run the program from there. If I wanted to save some data, I’d have to remove the program disk, swap in a data disk, save my work, and then reinsert the program disk. (A couple of years later I “upgraded” to a system with two floppy drives. I still didn’t have a hard drive, but at least I no longer had to swap disks. Bliss!)

More than 25 years later, it’s hard to even imagine trying to use a computer that way, particularly because we currently have an embarrassment of riches ...

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