I lost a perfectly good external hard disk device with removable platters - a quaint branch of technology, now defunct. I could put 250 MB disks in this machine and had a lot of data (by the standards of the day - a whole GB!!!).

Anyway, it's power supply died and the company (Syquest) went bust. SO I looked at the pin configuration, read the voltages (+- 12v, +- 5V). AHA! says my brain. That's exactly what a PC power unit puts out, so I fished and soldered some wires from an old power unit we had retired because it couldn't feed a whole PC, and my disks came back from the dead.

It LOOKED like a kludge, it WAS a kludge, but it worked sweetly!

They've gone back to the dead, now. The interface was a curious one that piggy-backed on the printer port. Microsoft stopped supporting it about Windows20000...