Nowhere fast...
Today was one of those work days where I was tearing around at Mach 3 with my hair on fire trying to get as much done as possible - seeing as how I'll be at KSC all of next week - while all around me folks are rushing no less feverishly to complete their modicum of work for the Friday before Labor Day weekend and book out the door sometime in the mid-afternoon.
Of course, the nature of my work is such that I need to talk to such people in order to get anything done, so we all end up in this strange dream-like state where everyone is whirling around like articles of clothing in a dryer, in close proximity, but not close enough to matter. Yikes.
At any rate, the work day is over. I've acquired an el-cheapo piece of iron with a 333-MHz CPU, 32 MB of memory, and a 2.1 GB drive, and I'm having one merry time trying to shoehorn one of the modern Linux systems onto the hard disk. The first attempt yesterday seemed to end in success, as the machine booted and did everything you'd expect a partially configured Linux box to do. However, upon firing up the machine today and configuring the network, I find that there are some critical software `parts' missing, specifically, in the mail end of the world. This is not good.
So, I am reinstalling Linux and avoiding the `automatic' install feature, to the extent that I can. Since I have neither the temperament nor the experience to be able to pick out which of 1000-some-odd packages I need to install, I've allowed the installation program to do the honors for some general areas that I selected from a list. Why a utility for zooming into fractal images was installed, I can only begin to guess. Fractals are cool, but I do NOT need to be able to zoom into them (or, actually, even display them in the first place). Ye gods.
Segue.
Talking about a 333-MHz CPU reminds me of the box of `single-density' diskettes for my Osborne-1 that I pulled out of a box recently, together with some of the family's paper history. The Osborne-1, for the uninitiated, was the first complete, industrial-strength, portable microcomputer sold. It made its debut in the early 1980s, and featured - in one package - two floppy drives, 64 KB of RAM, a 24-line by 52-column screen, keyboard, parallel and serial ports, and (most important) software! The machine came bundled with WordStar, CBASIC, and SuperCalc, which ran under the CP/M operating system. I lucked out when I bought it, as there was a special promotion that included dBase II as well.
Anyway, several of the disks in the box are marked 'Journal' with a date range; each disk holds 90 KB of data. As I'm handling the disks, I happen to glance at some of the family paper and it occurs to me that the letters and photographs handed down to me from my parents and grandparents have a better chance of being conveyed intact to my kids than all of the text I laid down and stored on magnetic disk, in what has turned out to be a horribly obsolete format. And the issue is not that I saved the stuff on disks formatted for an Osborne computer (I may or may not be able to recover the data, at some cost), but that I continue to rely on media whose future is unknown at best, and short-term at worst.
For example, I know I have a bunch of 5" disks formatted for the IBM PC lying in a box around here somewhere. It occurs to me that I have no working computer on the premises that will read such disks.
Am I digging myself a hole by committing images and documents to CD-R?
Cheers...
Of course, the nature of my work is such that I need to talk to such people in order to get anything done, so we all end up in this strange dream-like state where everyone is whirling around like articles of clothing in a dryer, in close proximity, but not close enough to matter. Yikes.
At any rate, the work day is over. I've acquired an el-cheapo piece of iron with a 333-MHz CPU, 32 MB of memory, and a 2.1 GB drive, and I'm having one merry time trying to shoehorn one of the modern Linux systems onto the hard disk. The first attempt yesterday seemed to end in success, as the machine booted and did everything you'd expect a partially configured Linux box to do. However, upon firing up the machine today and configuring the network, I find that there are some critical software `parts' missing, specifically, in the mail end of the world. This is not good.
So, I am reinstalling Linux and avoiding the `automatic' install feature, to the extent that I can. Since I have neither the temperament nor the experience to be able to pick out which of 1000-some-odd packages I need to install, I've allowed the installation program to do the honors for some general areas that I selected from a list. Why a utility for zooming into fractal images was installed, I can only begin to guess. Fractals are cool, but I do NOT need to be able to zoom into them (or, actually, even display them in the first place). Ye gods.
Segue.
Talking about a 333-MHz CPU reminds me of the box of `single-density' diskettes for my Osborne-1 that I pulled out of a box recently, together with some of the family's paper history. The Osborne-1, for the uninitiated, was the first complete, industrial-strength, portable microcomputer sold. It made its debut in the early 1980s, and featured - in one package - two floppy drives, 64 KB of RAM, a 24-line by 52-column screen, keyboard, parallel and serial ports, and (most important) software! The machine came bundled with WordStar, CBASIC, and SuperCalc, which ran under the CP/M operating system. I lucked out when I bought it, as there was a special promotion that included dBase II as well.
Anyway, several of the disks in the box are marked 'Journal' with a date range; each disk holds 90 KB of data. As I'm handling the disks, I happen to glance at some of the family paper and it occurs to me that the letters and photographs handed down to me from my parents and grandparents have a better chance of being conveyed intact to my kids than all of the text I laid down and stored on magnetic disk, in what has turned out to be a horribly obsolete format. And the issue is not that I saved the stuff on disks formatted for an Osborne computer (I may or may not be able to recover the data, at some cost), but that I continue to rely on media whose future is unknown at best, and short-term at worst.
For example, I know I have a bunch of 5" disks formatted for the IBM PC lying in a box around here somewhere. It occurs to me that I have no working computer on the premises that will read such disks.
Am I digging myself a hole by committing images and documents to CD-R?
Cheers...