I'm not sure; it may have been obsolete before I was born, but my dad brought some old stuff home that they'd just taken out of service (around 1990, I guess, when I was 6), and we tried (in vain) to connect the 8" drives up to an IBM interface, and then turned my sister and I loose on it.

We actually got good at the skills side of computer service quite young, soldering, desoldering, and mechanical work on the delicate mechanisms that tape-eaters and disk drives had back then. The soldering particularly came in handy when we built our YASBEC.