Goodness! My first HDD was a 40Mb drive in a no-name clone PC-XT a good while ago. Nice little machine too, that I spent hours tuning to perfection. I actually used that drive for years, booting FreeSCO on a router/firewall until it died a few years ago.
Started with a ZX81 though and wrote my first database program. Then it was a Spectrum and Microdrives - funnily enough I never had any trouble with them and last time I resurrected the system about a year ago, the drives still read without problems.
I was a Microsoft thrall for years until I discovered Linux.
