Lets start with a simple one...
Back in the dim and distant past, when the (very) young Duke was working in the service sector and being paid actual money in his actual hand. I had an account with the TSB for the simple reason that it was closest to my school. The meagre wages I paid in every week were slowly building up to a respectable sum, which I was saving to spend on a hard drive for my Amiga, a huge investment for a geeky 17 yearold.

This was the easy bit. Monday morning, pay money in, get recipt, tuck recipt into savings book, head on to school for another week of tedious Comp. Sci. lessons in which the teacher could almost keep up with us.

Then, the fateful day. I had enough money in my account to send off a cheque for the hard drive and Not quite flatten my account down to zero.
So I did, and a few days after that I was enjoying the phenomenal cosmic power that only 20 megabytes of passably fast disk storage can give.

A few days after that a letter arrived from the bank saying essentially:-
"This account requires a minimum deposit of £5, You have fallen below this minimum for N days. Please deposit funds as soon as possible or we'll close your account. PS this letter has cost you £25"

Followed the next day by a letter saying:-
"Your account is £20.87 overdrawn, you have no overdraft facility in place so we are charging you £50. PS this letter has cost you £25"

Followed at second post with a handfull of letters saying:-
"There is no credit facility on this account. We have been forced to refuse a payment from your account so we are charging you £25 for refusing payment. PS this letter has cost you £25"

etc...

Over £500 in self generating bank charges before some machine somewhere crashed its cogs, decided that something wasn't right, and froze my account.

Cue a slightly pale faced young Duke heading to the bank with a school bag full of increasingly threatening letters and a fiver borrowed from his mum.

Fortunately the bank manager showwed a little common sense and the charges were cancelled as soon as I paid the cash in.

No mess, no major hassle, aside from one thing.
Mum never let me forget the day that I was in hideous, life crippling, unrepayable debt and
she lent me a miracle fiver to get my life back on track and make me the rich and happy man I am today.

Ahm, yeah, thanks mum...
( DukeEuphoria Comes highly reccomended, Tue 21 Jul 2009, 19:11, 3 replies)

I'll bet the drive
was one of those GVP ones, wasn't it? Did you stick a SIMM in the front with a whole extra meg of memory in it? I did!

An Amiga with a hard drive was a whole different animal to a stock one. The Workbench suddenly became usable as it had access to all the command line (yes, I see the irony) tools. I'll also bet you spent ages fiddling around with ToolManager to get things *just right*. Or maybe that was only me.
(dxg, Tue 21 Jul 2009, 20:49, closed)

aah, memories...
I remember longing after a 20Meg HD for our Atari. A snip at £300 from the pages of ST Format, if I recall correctly.

Isn't it a little bit scary that the price of storage has dropped below a third of that, for 50,000 times the capacity? (Back-of-the-envelope calculations, I know)
( The Incredible Sulk Finally remembered his password on, Wed 22 Jul 2009, 5:15, closed)

Bet those two ^ stopped reading after the word Amiga.
;)
(TheColonel, Wed 22 Jul 2009, 11:41, closed)