For the longest time I’ve been promising to get rid of some of the junk I’ve accumulated over the years. The great white whale of this project has been my pile of old computers. (And it literally is a pile.) I can’t just toss them, I have to go through all the data on them and get make sure I save all the important stuff. After nearly two years of avoidance, I’ve been starting the process.
My first hurdle was the Mac Plus. That computer is about twenty years old, and from the time before hard drives. So you would think I wouldn’t have any data to clean up off of that, but you would be wrong. We had eventually purchased a 40mb external hard drive for it. But I figured that I could connect it to the Performa 6200CD (which is only ten years old) and use that to clean it off. (I’m not even going to talk about the pile of floppy disks that I have to deal with too. Thank god the Performa still had a floppy drive.)
So I set up the Performa and it refused to acknowledge the hard drive. It doesn’t have the drivers it needs, or something like that. I found the old install disks for that hard drive, but the Performa is a PowerPC, so it isn’t actually compatible with the 68000 chip that the software expects. So now I’ll need to bring up the Mac Plus to use the hard drive and then use floppy disks for the important data. That would be possible if the hard drive wasn’t using the power cord from the Mac Plus. It seems in the inheriting process for the Mac Plus hard drive, the SCSI and power cables went missing. So I’ve been using others, but now I’ll need to try and scrounge up a Mac Plus power cord for the one hour I’ll need to do this.
Since I can’t do anything about that on a weekend, I worked on trying to network the Performa with my laptop. I had a lot of trouble with that. I could get the Performa to see the laptop, but the connection got dropped every time I entered the password. I figure it has something to do with firewalls. Eventually I got the laptop to connect to the Performa after I tried the bleeding obvious solution: Reboot the computer.
Now that I’ve done the proof of concept, all I have to do is go through all the floppy disks and put the good data onto the hard drive. Then I’ll suck them all onto the laptop.
But I’ll do that some other day.