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I have moved the naked computer into my shop. It seems computers are ganging up on me these days. I just lost three hours of work yesterday because of something weird. I hit or clicked on something while I was working, which just happened to flash a dialog box on the screen, and the button that appeared right under my mouse pointer as I happened to click at the very same moment, was a "NO" button. It was asking me if I wanted to save my work. So there went three hours down the drain.

In my futility, I didn't want to do anything with computers except perhaps start shoveling them over the balcony. So what did I do, instead? I hauled my magic box and the naked computer into my shop where I wouldn't have to look at it anymore. The fewer the better.



However, these things must be in my blood, because instead of dumping the stuff out of sight and going back into the apartment, I started digging through my box of parts. And I came up with this very large (physically) SCSI hard drive that I had extracted from an old computer years ago (a computer I never used). The drive is not much smaller than the computer mainboard, itself. Out of curiosity, I plugged it into the naked computer (after also digging up the SCSI controller card and cable for it), and guess what?

It worked!

Maybe I should just stick with the old stuff, since it works. I think it just works because it's DOS. No GUI operating system like Windows to muck up the works. Which brings me to my next adventure. But before I get into that, I just wanted to mention that I found a few interesting personal files on that big drive that were left behind by whomever owned the computer before I acquired it. It is a 64 MB hard drive, by the way - an old Seagate.

Anyway, one file on the drive had a list of three or four children (with their addresses and ages), and another file contained a letter to someone, offering to do some preaching in the role of a pastor for a church.

Hmmm.

Another file was a short letter to someone's brother, and a couple of files were references to someone's wonderful grandmother who had taken this person to see the Barnum and Bailey Circus when he or she was a child.

Circus?! CIRCUS??!!! Hey - what a coincidence!

Anyway, after I unplugged the huge drive, I plugged in a physically smaller, but larger in capacity, 1.2GB drive and it had Windows ME on it. I wondered if it would boot, so I let it try. It took over an hour to boot. SEE WHAT I MEAN ABOUT GUI OPERATING SYSTEMS? It was taking way to long to shut down after I finally told it to do so, so I turned off the power.

I won't try to boot that again.

So, it took me going back to an old '486 [naked] computer for me to do use things I have never used before: a SCSI hard drive, and Windows ME. Not that there is any relevance to that in the universal scheme of things. I just thought it was interesting, even if you don't.