Save the Yestertech

Long ago, I grew up like lots of geeks currently in their mid-30’s: with an Apple and a Commodore. Unlike a lot of geeks, I had an Apple IIgs and a Commodore SX-64. Still have the SX-64, actually (and it’s for sale).

I used to spend the requisite (inordinate) amount of time playing games or writing little programs in Basic with my best friend. And I accumulated quite a stack of 5.25” floppy disks for my trouble.

Fast forward to nowadays. The SX-64 is sitting lonely in my office. I have replaced its magnificence with an emulator, Power64. Many of my personal disks, though, remain out of reach. Oh, I know there are schematics online, and even little dangly bits you can buy for exhorbitant prices that let you attach your 1541 to a PC’s parallel port. You can probably even get a parallel-to-USB adapter and maybe even get them to a Mac. But I don’t have a 1541, so the disks also just sit here, lonely. When I scanned them in on a whim, it occurred to me that the resulting image files were larger than the disks they were pictures of. Which led me to this fun thought: steganographically embed the contents of the disk image into the actual image of the disk. Make it a true disk image.

We need a service, not unlike the CDs-to-iPod ripping or photos-to-CD scanning: You send your old floppies to them, and they’ve got all the yestertech to deal with migration, and they send you back emulator-compatible disk images, steganographically embedded into scanned pictures of the actual disk. Somebody get on that quick, because I don’t have the time.

Update: Dave Dribin points me at RetroFloppy, whose tagline “Don’t let your old data die.” could have been the title of this post.

Anna

Yesterday was the first anniversary of my adoption of Anna Banana (later rebadged “The Yellow Peril”), a 1976 Toyota Land Cruiser. If you didn’t know me, you might think she was a pre-midlife crisis. If you knew me, you know I’ve wanted one since at least my Sophomore year at college. She’s in incredible shape for a piece of machinery nearly as old as I am. She’d easily be a daily driver, if I didn’t work from home.

I drove down to Raleigh last year with my best friend to check her out. I’d been hunting FJ40s on craigslists from Florida to Maine and as far West as West Virginia. She was in better shape than I’d been hoping for. Good frames are hard to come by, especially on the East Coast. We do have our love affair with road salt. Still, she checked out with only minor body trouble: rust in all the usual places. A few months after I bought her, I needed to swap out the primary clutch cylinder. That’s the last mechanical thing I’ve had to do.

In the Spring, Matt and I took our rigs camping in George Washington National Forest in western Virginia. It was like I had let Anna off her leash. She ran lightly over mud roads and climbed rocks and back roads and splashed through creeks like a puppy. I’m sad to report that she outlived her camping companion, a truck two decades her junior. RIP, Fred.

In a fit of financial bravado, I bought her with one of those ubiquitous credit card checks. With no interest until January of 2009, it seemed like a steal. Today, almost a month early, I paid her off. One more debt stone off my back. She still purrs like a kitten, provided I give here enough choke and time. Tonight, she brought home our Christmas tree. The first one to grace our house since 2001, the year we moved in.

Anna belongs to a class of machine that is close to my heart: Simple and pure, understandable by one person, reparable in the field. Chairs, pencil sharpeners, trucks. Not too clever, just rugged and dependable.

Some day, I’ll convince Amber to let me bolt a carseat to the bed of Anna, and Lex can go places with me that the Jetta couldn’t dream of reaching. Until then, it’ll still be by own private adventure every time I crank her up.