In 1988, I started working for a company whose software was written in dBase II and Foxbase. That was pretty cutting edge at the time. But, although they had run coax cable for an Arcnet Novell network, none of the workstations (8086 and 80286 running MSDOS) had network cards yet. So they were carrying a large (full size/height) 80MB ESDI drive from machine to machine on a padded tray and plugging it into external ESDI ports on the workstations to copy customer data to from it.