A hard drive as a table

There were a couple of fascinating gents at the coffee shop yesterday. One of them used to work at HP in Australia, and he ended up collecting a lot of scrap hardware. His crowning achievement was taking home an early hard drive and using it as a table, which should give you a sense of scale. He lamented that the platters were removed and destroyed, but it still had the chassis and a massive transformer. His friend commented that he got into building things after talking to his dad who built radios out of scraps during the war, and that if he could do that, someone with the Internet and all the parts available in the world should be able to as well. I’ve been thinking about all that ever since. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-09-10.