Still trying to toss stuff

Zip disks, on top. Note that the triangular, clear, plastic, prism’y inserts are not visible from the top. » See “A deck of Zip disks”

I have committed the “mistake” of going to my “Obsolete Tech box” in the garage. There I found a few more things to photograph, document, and toss, but I discovered that I still have two Zip drives. One is an Iomega external drive and the other is a drive that was integrated into a Dell Inspiron 7500 we had … waayy back. (The 7500 was initially released in 1999!)

In the box in the garage, I also discovered a couple different cabling connectors I didn’t have when I posted several connectors last month.

Why did I have so many Zip disks? At the time I was doing web design. I wanted to put course materials online for my students and there was no one to do it for me, so I learned html, web design, and webmastering on my own. (I used Nick Bradbury’s HomeSite, a wonderful, non-WYSIWYG web authoring program.) Lots of files. Lots of images. I needed to have them both at home and on-campus, so I had to have a means of transport and backup. I could have emailed them to myself, I suppose, but I had a wonderful little app, FileSync, that would sync folders between two drives. ([Affordable] Cloud storage was not an option 25 years ago!) With lots of files and lots of folders, it would have required a boatload of 3½" floppies at only 1.44Mb per diskette. Given the available storage technologies or solutions at the time, 100Mb Zip disks were an answer.

[ PXL_20240308_010345144_9x12tm :: cell phone ]

March 7 posts
  1 year ago: “Joy [Filler]”
 2 years ago: “Under the hood”
 3 years ago: “Spindles”
 4 years ago: “A 2½-year old’s ‘Cheese!’”
 5 years ago: “A highly-anticipated part of every day…”
 6 years ago: “One-frame day”
 7 years ago: “Lunch with a view” (Grand Canyon)
 8 years ago: “Eggs in a bowl” (This should have been a flash-o-red post in February!)
 9 years ago: “Liberia Martyrs”
10 years ago: “‘Matchstick Plant’ buds”
11 years ago: “Coffea arabica?”
12 years ago: “Chair back…”
13 years ago: “Ya think?”

[Mags]

Wow! You did well! Nice clear capture too.

[Kathy]

The shot is so clear there’s texture on those zip drives. Who knew?

[GaryW]

I had hundreds of pictures on these and finally just tossed them all. It was sad, but more trouble to find a way to save them.