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Way back in the late 80's I set up my grandfather's first computer system for his office. We bought him an original IBM PC XT. I installed a Shugart 5MB hard drive in it (full height 5 1/4"). I was a teenager, and that was the first hard drive I ever installed. I remember you had to have a custom EPROM programmed for the specific drive you were using to put on the controller card!

Shortly after, I recommended one of these fancy new things called a "Laser Printer" to replace the noisy and temperamental daisy-wheel printer he originally bought with the PC. We got him a brand new HP LaserJet II.

Fast forward to a couple of years later, and building that his office was in burnt almost to the ground. It was a historic 100 year old (at the time) Victorian mansion along the river that had been converted to offices. There was an electrical fault in the old phone system's power supply. He was more upset about the beautiful old building burning than losing his office.

After the fire investigators got finished with their work, we were allowed into the building to salvage what we could. We got to where the PC and printer had been. The wood desk was mostly gone. The printer and PC looked mostly intact.

I took all of the equipment home, and set it up outside (the burnt smell was absolutely horrible). I looked at the printer, and all of the paper in the tray was mostly just ash. I dumped out the ashes, and wiped the tray clean. I put some new paper in the tray, wiped the control panel enough to be able to read the display, and powered up the printer. I went into the menu and selected to print a self test page, and it actually printed the two pages. The first one was covered in a lot of soot, but the second one looked totally fine. Literally, a whole 3-story building burnt down around it, and thing still printed just fine. I wished later on that I had taken some pictures of it where it was in the rubble of the building. People told me I could have sent the pictures to HP. HP was a much different company back in those days.

The insurance company ended up replacing the printer, along with the PC and other equipment anyway. There was no way to get the horrible small out of any of it.

Also, the data on the old Shugart hard drive survived!! That turned out to be a huge bit of luck, since almost all of his paper files were lost.