I'm an electronics pack rat. I also tend to ramble, as this offering
will prove to you, because it wanders around like someone surfing from
one pointless task to another, which of course is exactly what it is
relating to you. This story begins with a file called
SMARTPLY.ASC.
I was digging around on my hard drive the other day when it occurred
to me to ask, "What's the oldest file on my hard drive?" I tend not to
delete stuff unless forced to by circumstances beyond my control; I'll
file it, mind you, but I won't delete it. I'm a pack rat.
A Sherlock search of my own hard drive revealed the answer soon
enough: Discarding the files marked prior to 1980, because I know I
didn't have a computer to make a file then (and any file labeled 1906
was obviously due to a badly set clock), I discovered some old lesson
plans and handouts from my second year of teaching, 1986-87. I'm sure
many of you will be able to beat that limit, but consider the life this
file (SMARTPLY.ASC) has led. I didn't use a computer for my
first year of teaching; handwriting those ditto masters convinced me
that writing anything twice was a waste of time, so I begged a computer
from the other physics teacher at our school.
In 1986 it would have been typed on an Apple II computer and stored
on a 5.25" floppy disk.
Sometime around 1988 it would have been transferred to a 3.5" floppy
via an Apple IIgs to an Atari 520ST by way of a PC-formatted floppy. It
probably "lived" on floppies for several years and visited hard drives
from time to time.
Around 1990, I got a hard drive for the ST, so eventually all my
lesson plans and handouts wound up there. They lived there until 1992,
when I got a job with the Kentucky State Dept. of Education. A couple
of yeas later, I was in possession of a PowerBook Duo 230, and eventually all
my important files wound up there. Running System 7.1, the Duo had
catastrophic (read: reformat necessary) crashes once or twice, and I'm
sure I eventually resorted to reloading the files from the archival
copies onto my brand spankin' new Power Mac 7200 in 1995.
I backed up the 7200 with 200 MB Syquest cartridges and had occasion
to use them once or twice, so the file probably "lived" on the
cartridges until 1998, when I purchased my current machine, a G3/300. The SyQuest died in
that time period, but I haven't had more than one or two knockdown,
drag-out hard drive wipes since then either.
Copies of the file are now stored on CD-R, and when I upgraded to a
15 GB drive a couple of years ago, I moved all the files over including
this ancient document. That makes my G3 nearly four years old now. It's
showing its age, but it still does the jobs I need.
The most I ever use those old files for is as working drafts to edit
a new handout for a class. Most of the time I end up changing so much I
might as well have started from scratch, but it comforts me to know
those files are still there and following me around, patiently waiting
just in case I might need them.
Speaking of Old Files
If you want to talk "old files", here's a link to check out:
http://www.tinfoil.com/cm-0101.htm.
This file is a digital recording of an early clock device. Tinfoil.com
is a fascinating site; check it out.
Now that's really old.
I've been reading ebooks published at www.fictionwise.com. They specialize
in science fiction, but it's several years back from what is available
in print bookstores. You can purchase individual short stories instead
of entire books for just a few cents. One story I ran across by Gregory
Benford, "Time Shards," expounds upon a technical paper written some
years ago that hypothesizes that a certain method of making pottery
involving a frame holding a stiff metal wire, engraving the pot like an
old style cylindrical phonograph, might have recorded sounds in much
the same way as an Edison-style cylinder recorder. Tiny motions of the
wire inscribe analog waves in the clay, which can be "played back" in
much the same way as a record is played.
In Benford's story, voices are also recorded - but I won't give
anything else away. It's a good story; if you haven't tried ebooks, you
could not have a gentler introduction than fictionwise.com. According
to the background supplied by Benford, actual sounds of the potters'
wheels have been recovered, but no voices. It turns out an X-Files
episode was based on the same premise, probably derived directly from
Benford's story (as much of the X-Files is derived from classic science
fiction and horror). If there have been any current breakthroughs in
this area, I'd love to know about them, but an exhaustive Google search
turned up pretty much what I just told you.
Search for Yourself
Speaking of Google, when's the last time you did a search for
yourself on Google? C'mon, you know you've done it; everyone does.
Because I write for Low End Mac, I expected
a bunch of links from that, and, of course, they were there. There were
also links from the fine folks at MacSurfer, Mac Observer, MyAppleMenu,
Educator's News, Architosh, Applelinks, and a few others - more than I
expected, really. Also a few citations from teachers using the Mac Lab
Report for a paper or opinion essay, and a bunch of hits from my own
pages for school and hobbies (naturally).
I also found there are a bunch of people named Jeff Adkins; some are
involved in sports, others have done masters level work in
horticulture, and one works for NASA, which is kind of spooky. One guy
is mentioned as a pallbearer for a funeral. Sometimes I'm tempted to
contact these alternate Jeffs and ask them who they are and what their
life is like, but I usually conclude they'll think I'm some sort of
wierdo (possibly true) and potentially dangerous (most likely not), and
they'll refuse to respond to me.
Nevertheless, if you're active on the Web at all, it's an
interesting exercise.
The Meaning of It All
These searches for myself and tracking of ancient files probably
have some deep philosophical meaning related to perpetuating myself
into cyberspace as a sort of immortality by proxy. I'd pursue that
further, but it's late, and I probably should get some sleep.
Nitey-night.
