Data Integrity
The other night I posted an old paper from school in which I reviewed Blood Simple. It was from my days at the U in the film program. CMP 403 I think was the movie reviewing class. You sit around Tuesday or Thursday in the movie theatre in the Memorial Building. My instructor at the time was Bill Cosford, the critic for the Miami Herald. He’s since passed away and the theatre has been renamed after his honor.
We spent 14 weeks watching a film at a time. Then we’d turn in some review. I think I got a B in that class. Judging from some of the comments to the post, you guys liked it. I kind of don’t. I realize that maybe I should’ve been less academic with the review. Maybe more like a review you find in the paper. I guess that’s why I got a B in the class. My writing was too academic without a voice.
Yet, you wonder, “Where did that post come from?” “Did you copy it verbatim from a paper?” Nope. It’s on a 720Kb floppy from the early 90s! And getting it off the disk was an adventure.
First, I had to resurrect my PowerBook 190. The laptop battery is dead as well as the clock battery. I have to plug it in to have it running. My old papers are either written in a MS Word 4 or 5 or MacWrite. I have neither on that laptop, but luckily it has DataViz’s MacLink translator software to convert it to Claris write. So I save it to plain ascii text. Thank god for plain ascii text.
Yet, the PowerBook 190 doesn’t have internet connection (dial up, but…). So I save it to a PC floppy and transfer it through sneaker net to my Win95 machine from which I upload it to the net. Downloard it to the MacMini. And voila, post it back up to blogger.
That data is old. Sixteen years. Amazing that I can still read this stuff. In another few, once my PowerBook 190 and my Win95 PC are dead, I won’t be able to revisit this stuff and things go back to the ether from whence they came.
3 Replies to “Data Integrity”
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save it up now while u can! remember the mini disc that troubled my macbook in its early days? that disc has loads of my papers from 8/9 years ago. though yes, its on a mini disc.
Mini Disc! That’s worse than my floppy. Who made those?
mini discs were made to be slipped into the little night purse so that u can hand it over without doubt to your ally while in a ball. mission: impossible style. hihihi!