Life Among the Geeks

[nonelvis]

columbina is assembling his new computer this evening, so I did a quick census of all the various working and non-working computers in this home. Officially, there are two computers for every man, woman, and cat in this household, and only two of us are equipped with the opposable thumbs necessary to use the machines.

All but two of the computers (an aluminum PowerBook with a fried logic board, and columbina's freshly dead Win98 WinMe machine) are still functional. If you count the various PDAs in the house, we have three more "computers," all of which are also still functional -- a Palm V, some newer Palm thingy, and the Newton 2100 MessagePad you will pry from my cold, dead hands. (I don't use it anymore, but neither am I willing to let it go. It has sentimental value.)

For those of you who may have lost count, that's eight computers, plus three computer-like objects, for two humans.

I don't even want to get into what the boxes full of cables look like, but at least I think I finally dumped the AppleTalk boxes a couple of years ago.

Comments

[profrobert.livejournal.com]

Hey, if the Apple Store can't get my files off the floppies, do you think your 7200 could swing it? I have an external drive with about an inch of double-sided pins that connect to my Plus; if the 7200 has that port, we might be in business if you can network it to something that has a flash drive (my ultimate goal is to get the files on my flash).

[nonelvis]

The 7200 has a floppy drive, so there would be no need to bring your drive. Of course, we still have to figure out how to connect it to the network, but I'm sure we can work that out. I should also have a floppy drive for the Lombard PowerBook, though it might no longer work since I upgraded that machine to OS X.

Let me put it this way: if the computers we have can read your data, we can get a copy of it to you somehow. If the floppies are corrupted, though, there won't be anything I can do.

[profrobert.livejournal.com]

No, the disks are fine. The run great on my Plus. Only problem is printing them out -- my ImageWriter II runs fine, except that after 21 years, the ribbon's dried out (go figure). I think I actually found a ribbon for sale on the internet, so I can print it out, but I'd still like to get the data on to something I can access on a modern device.

[nonelvis]

Ah, of course -- I did the same a few years ago with my college papers, all of which were on 5.25" floppies.

Let me know if the Genius Bar fails you; one way or another, I'm sure columbina and I could help.