I went to Fry's today to get a 1Tb external USB drive they had advertised for about $80. Of course, it was out of stock. The old Fry's bait and switch trick. Anyway, I needed about a 300 Gig drive for a certain project. They had a Toshiba that fit the bill (cheap!) so I bought it and brought it home. When I opened the box, there was a 16 page booklet inside. I opened it up looking for instructions. It had none. It was page after page of warranty information in several languages including US English; Canadian English; Australia, New Zealand, PNG English; South & Southeast Asia English. Didn't mention the chaps in the UK. Maybe they aren't yet advanced to this level of technology, who knows?

Anyway, I looked through the booklet for instructions, and finally figured out they were on the cover, a scan of which is included here. Pretty simple. A single step, plug it in. Remember way back when you were adding stuff to your original IBM PC? The instructions were cryptic, at best. It had to do with setting DIP switches. I remember when I got the scalding fast Hayes 2400 Smartmodem. I screwed around with it for a long time before having success. I remember at one point thinking to myself, "Let's see, 8 switches, that would be a total of 256 possible combinations, a reboot takes about 2 minutes, this could take days." Of course, I finally got it working and started hitting my favorite BBS's and was stunned, absolutely stunned at what 2400 baud would do.

So now I have the new drive hooked up and it is doing a backup just like I wanted it to do. The only hitch was that I had to reformat it to NTFS. No problem. Off and running in a minute. Things have improved. But you have to admit that it was damned fun messing around in the old days, as long as there was beer in the refrigerator.