rickshangle.com

My former colleague Tim sent me this awesomeness over at engadget.

Seeing those styles seemed to open a wormhole in the iPod of my mind, and before I knew it was sliding back to 1987-1989, when I was running a BBS.

My perception was flooded with memories and emotions.

old sk00l, 1987-style. k-rad warez, RLE graphics… in the days before GIF. USR Modems… should i choose the HST, the V.32 or the Dual-Standard model, for $950?

18Kbits per second. I’ve never seen a 400K floppy fill up so fast! This phone call to australia to download these warez is almost going to be cheaper than just going out to buy the program! Almost!

White Knight BBS for old Classic Mac OS… 5? 6?

Wait… was White Knight the BBS program? Yeah. The same guy also wrote the term program, called Red Ryder.

Or maybe Red Ryder became White Knight. Can’t remember with clarity.

Z-MODEM!

My board, at various points, was called:

The Bat Cave
…

sadly… I can’t remember any other names of the board. Maybe, by some miracle, someone reading this does.

Had a 20MB internal hard drive on my Mac SE, which ran the board. It died. Seagate piece of s**t.

I would turn on the SE, and I would hear the drive spin up, then crash stop. Click.

You’d take the drive out of the chassis (and this was a known problem with the old Seagates… they would get smooshed drive bearings), you would hold it between your hands, like you were praying, and you would SPIN the drive mechanism, to free whatever bearing was stuck.

I guess you were, in fact, praying. Praying that, as a middle-schooler, you could save enough money to buy a non-crap hard drive.

Then it would work for a while, until it stopped working again, and you had to repeat that process.

In 1989 or so, replaced that with a 80MB external SCSI Ehman systems (also Seagate) which got me along for a while. That was like… $650. It was also a piece of crap, and lasted about a year.

My first two hard drives seem to have set the tone for my lifelong experiences with premature data loss.

Yesterday, in 2005, I bought a 300GB Maxtor external drive for $300.

Backed up that 80MB focker via 70 or so floppy disks and a program called… well, through the ages, it eventually was purchased and became, in some way shape or form, Dantz (now EMC) Retrospect. But at the time, what was it called… can’t remember… can’t remember. Maybe something pragmatic like, “Backup”.

Sitting at my desk, stack of floppies, labeling them, feeding them one after the other into the gaping maw of the floppy drive. Hours per backup. Hours. Hours. Hours. I don’t even have MP3’s to listen to. Just this crap Sony radio. I haven’t even discovered alternative / punk rock yet. I’m probably listening to Michael Jackson. Perhaps, if I was cooler than I remember myself to be, Billy Idol.

Maybe if I was supremely fortunate, I was listening to the Police, Synchronicity

i don’t think the concept of incremental backups had occurred to me… or perhaps whatever program I was using didn’t support them.

Still swirling, through the mists…

rds