Deth

I was up in the attic the other day digging through boxes looking for something the other day. I was trying to dig up an HDMI cable for something. I keep all my unused cables because you never know when you might need one. Naturally I didn’t have and never actually do seem to have the one I need at the moment. I did stumble on a box with my old zip disks in it.

I don’t remember the last time I had a working zip drive or even a motherboard with a parallel port to use the one I had for that matter. The zip drive seemed like a good idea at the time I bought it. CD burners were still expensive floppy disks were slow and small. The Iomega zip drive just seemed like the best solution for my dilemma at the time and it was. Cd burners got cheaper along with the rewrite able disks but that took a couple of years after I got my zip disks.

I needed a way to back stuff up so I could clear up space on my hard drive. It was only 800 or so megabytes, most of which was taken up by windows stuff. Buying another hard drive was out of my price range at that time too and I thought I’d have to pay to have it installed since I was afraid I’d fuck something up trying to install it with my poor vision. I was also considering trying out Linux on my computer at the time. I had ordered a package from a website that included diskettes with several different Linux distros and I believe FreeBSD and OpenBSD. I just wasn’t brave enough to try them out at the time.

The other main reason I needed more storage then was my next computer had a slightly larger hard drive. It was 2 gigs or sol if I remember correctly. Around that time both mp3.com and Napster were a thing and they were a great way to discover new music. I still have things that pop into my mind I’d originally downloaded from these to sources that I wind up searching out and buying. The music industry really dropped the ball by not coming up with a reasonable to them yet similar method of discovering new music.

Finding the disks really got me curious. I am curious what I have on them. It could be like a look into my past at things I’ve forgotten. I was in a dark place in my life then and was among other things still writing poetry. I did some Delphi programs then too and I’d be curious to see what I wrote.

I searched the usual places to see if I can’t pick up a used and cheap zip drive but haven’t seen one cheap enough that I’d want to order it. It’s been so many years since I’ve bought anything on eBay I didn’t know if I really wanted to trust what I saw there. One of these days I’m sure I will either bite the bullet and buy a drive or forget it and throw the disks out. I just can’t see spending a lot of money on something I won’t use again just out of curiosity but then again they did say curiosity killed the cat.