Ole Juul
Veteran Member
After posting on Ian's anniversary thread I got to thinking that my first hands-on experience was actually funny. Although I had and academic interest that went back about a decade, I didn't get my hands dirty until some time in the late 80's. We'd had (IIRC) an XT-286 where I used WordPerfect, but I didn't dare open it up. So when someone gave me a broken XT I was greatly pleased and it being a fliptop, I immediately dove in. I should probably be embarrassed to admit my hardware ignorance at such a late stage, but I've certainly made up for it since.
So, I had the system unit, keyboard, and screen, plugged in. But it didn't work. I was told it didn't work. What now? Luckily I had some friends that I could ask about these things. The first thing that I learnt is that I need a boot disk, and that it had to be a working one. The next lesson was how the floppy cable works with the A and B drive. It took a couple of days to get all that sorted, at which point I learnt another couple of lessons - courtesy of the original owner. The extra lessons were, don't overwrite the boot disk, and don't fiddle with the cables unless you know how they go. At this point, if someone were to give me a machine like that, I don't think that I would even notice that it was "broken".
One more thing about that early "hacking". I didn't have all the DOS utilities and one that was missing was the format. For quite a while I got around that by keeping a working disk that I would just diskcopy. So there was another great lesson. There's more than one way to skin a cat - and in the digital domain, you can do it more than once!
So, I had the system unit, keyboard, and screen, plugged in. But it didn't work. I was told it didn't work. What now? Luckily I had some friends that I could ask about these things. The first thing that I learnt is that I need a boot disk, and that it had to be a working one. The next lesson was how the floppy cable works with the A and B drive. It took a couple of days to get all that sorted, at which point I learnt another couple of lessons - courtesy of the original owner. The extra lessons were, don't overwrite the boot disk, and don't fiddle with the cables unless you know how they go. At this point, if someone were to give me a machine like that, I don't think that I would even notice that it was "broken".
One more thing about that early "hacking". I didn't have all the DOS utilities and one that was missing was the format. For quite a while I got around that by keeping a working disk that I would just diskcopy. So there was another great lesson. There's more than one way to skin a cat - and in the digital domain, you can do it more than once!