Sounds kinda like my story.
My dad started programming in Fortran in the early-60's on mainframes. Punch cards were the input, and printers were the output. No keyboards or screens. He passed the courses but didn't use it till the early-70's when as a draftsman he re-wrote the non-working software application that his company (Anderson Electric, later to be bought by Square D) used to determine size and strength requirements on electric poles.
He switched to BASIC in the late-70's and by 1983 had produced AMS. It was one of the very earliest software packages for Auto Parts stores that did Point of Sale, Inventory, and Accounting. His only real competition was a large corp. called Triad. He'd started developement of AMS on a TRS-80 model 1, then a model 3 and 4. He re-wrote it to run on the CP/M operating system and got a fully working package up and running on a Kaypro II (I have the still working Kaypro in the spare bedroom). He needed a true multi-user platform and found it in a company called Action Computer Corp. Actions were available in a huge desktop model or a tall 19" rack format. Used an S-100 bus. One common card for the HDD/FDD controller, and each user had it's own Z-80 processor and RAM on a card, going serially to a Kimtron KT-7 dumb terminal.
At this point we're still talking early-to-mid-80's, and all this stuff was in our house. I'm 29 now, so well before I'd reached the age of 10 I was surrounded by all this cool stuff like reel-to-reel tape drives,
8" floppy disks (REALLY floppy!) and 30 meg hard drives with 15" platters. Which reminds me of a story he relayed to me...one of the big racks he'd installed in a warehouse was "walking" across the floor and unplugging itself. All the vibration from the 15" hard drive and all the fans were enough for it to roll on it's casters across the concrete floor, LOL...
By the time I'd reached 1990, I was pretty well versed in DOS...which isn't a big deal now, and certainly wasn't to me at the time, but it seemed to be to all these "adults" that couldn't operate a computer without a menu system to select their apps.
My 'training' via Dad consisted of troubleshooting hard drives for bad sectors, performing low level formats (remember those?) when necessary and using diagnostic software to determine whether they were worth keeping around as spares. By the time I was 14, my best friend and I had watched Dad enough to know what we were doing and we went into business selling PCs. Legit too...had a business license and everything.
It's funny that by 16 I was considered a badass by some, and I didn't let my skill set grow with the industry. Now I'm just average.
Still...your comment about the Maxtors made me laugh. Around '91 I was running a BBS in Knoxville on an 8MHz 286 that I'd rescued from the dead. It was my workhorse, troubleshooting PC. I stuffed a 55meg Maxtor in there whose bearings had by shot for a couple of years. It'd previously spent years runng 24/7 in one of Dad's customer's parts stores. That thing absolutely screamed---literally! Sometime's it'd spontaneously get 3-4 times louder, usually at 3am. I had grown accustomed to it's sound and could sleep right though the noise except when it decided to get really loud for those short little outbursts. ............... Anyway...I'm rambling here. Really just reminiscing. It's this love of the "good stuff" that has me studying Assembly programming for the x86 platform even as I write this. I set up a 486 as my programming test machine on the other side of the room.
You know some of those old MFM hard disks could be formatted using an RLL controller with 26 sectors per track instead of 17....a 40MB Seagate became a 65MB drive :-)
I miss "my" old days....
~jp