The day I realized I'd been installing IDE ribbon cables upside down for 3 years

I was swapping drives on my old Pentium II machine last month and my friend Tim from the local computer club in Akron just stared at me. He said 'wait, you know the red stripe goes to pin 1 right?' I had been jamming them in however they fit this whole time. Has anyone else ever run hardware backwards for years without knowing?

1 comments

1 Comment

johnson.lee1mo ago

Three years is nothing man, I had a Commodore 64 for almost a decade before I found out the power switch was supposed to click into place and I was just yanking the cord out every time. But seriously, does it actually screw anything up if the cable fits both ways? I've seen so many old boards where pin 1 is marked with a triangle or a dot and half the time the red stripe doesn't even line up with it anyway. Tim sounds like one of those guys who'll tell you your thermal paste application is wrong because you didn't do the pea method, meanwhile the computer boots fine. Unless you were bending pins or forcing it, I bet those drives worked just as good upside down.