intfiction.org

Failing to back up data: seems like everybody makes that mistake. Once.

I had the opposite problem for a long time: failure to restore backed-up data. I kept two old CPUs around for half a decade after I stopped using them just because they contained files I wanted to keep. I've still got to work through a mountain of floppy disks that may contain long lost files.

Better do it while your floppy drives still work. One of the things that bothers me about modern information-storage technology (and one of the reasons while I will hold on to my (paper and ink) books until somebody pries them from my cold dead fingers) is that, for all practical purposes, the data only lasts as long as the means of reading it is still available -- which tends to be a pretty short time. Anybody else have now-useless files on ZIP cartridges?

Robert Rothman

I call it "digital rot." I have music software files that won't load properly into the program on which they were created, in the same machine, because I moved a plug-in to a different folder.

Off-topic: I was musing the other day about the phrase "pry it from my cold dead fingers," so this morning I did a bit of searching. It appears Charlton Heston first used this phrase (with reference to firearms) in a speech in the year 2000, thus popularizing it.

The reason I was musing was that I believe I may be the original source of the phrase. I used it in a product review in Keyboard magazine around 1995, and Lexicon (the hardware manufacturer whose product I was reviewing) liked it so much they ran full-page ads for several months in all of the musician-type magazines, quoting me. So at that point, the phrase got spread around.

I may have been unconsciously quoting something I had heard -- but on the other hand, phrases that gain currency in pop culture do always start somewhere.

One thing you can do is salvage the hard drives from the old PCs and get a USB IDE hard drive enclosure. This will allow you to access the data on there. You could also take out the RAM sticks and put them on display as decoration.

_________________
"Will you stop breaking the fourth wall? It's costing me an absolute fortune to replace it!"

I have at least 5 very primitive 2-word text adventures made in CBM Basic in some 5" floppy disks.
What now?

It's been an cliche about guns for longer than that, and I'm pretty sure it's been an idiom for my entire life.

Google Books search finds a PC Magazine ad from 1993... Richard Linklater, 1992... 1988... 1985... oh, here it is (re guns) in Field and Stream from 1979. Foreword to a Stephen King collection, 1977.

Obviously not earlier than the Stephen King reference, but I believe there's a scene in Red Dawn showing a bumper sticker that says "They'll get my gun when they pry it from my cold, dead hands," followed by a pan to a Russian army officer prying the owner's gun from his cold, dead hands. That description always made me think it was supposed to be funny, but I suppose it wasn't.

Wikipedia saith that the original slogan originated with the Citizen's Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms in the mid-70's, though that leaves open the question of who came up with the catchiest phrasing.

The use I remember best is in the original Men In Black, when the alien responds "Your proposal is acceptable." That was meant to be funny.

You can get or make cables that allow a CBM 1541 disk drive to a PC, and use it to read disks: I modified one and used it to read the programs that I wrote back in the 1980s: http://sta.c64.org/cables.html

Woot! Will they run in an emulator?