Yes – you needed a HDD for Windows. Before Windows, very few things ‘needed’ a hard drive. Maybe “desktop publishing programs” (which you don’t hear about anymore). And thank you: I went on a campaign a few years ago to collect ALL my memories and artifacts that I could find. I got online in 1989 and after seeing online services get shut down and old posts of mine lost forever, I went around collecting everything I could find. What’s great is it helped me “fix” my memory; our memories are flawed and dates and ages shift. But with evidence, it’s possible to reconstruct memory and remove memory holes. I still have a few memory holes; vague periods of time. But I have instant access to a lot more of it now than I had before I started “re-collecting” (recollecting lol) it all.

I loved computer class. I had a basic “hook up to TV” computer at home and I had to learn the weird ones at school. I knew more than the teacher within two weeks and became “the guy”. Anybody wanted to play a game, I’d stop what I was doing, load it up for them, and go back to what I was doing. I liked using them but I liked being helpful more.