A Pox upon Zip Disks!

Way back in the day (the first part of this story takes place in my junior year of college, which preceded about 3 senior years) I had a 100MB Zip Drive. Man, that thing was cool. CD burners were very expensive and could be flaky but 100MB Zip disks were relatively cheap and reliable, and what could you have to transport that took up more than 100MB? That was so much space!

Anyway, I had a 100MB parallel port drive and Steve had a blazingly fast internal ATAPI one. His was less portable, but man, it was speedy. He would come down from UMD to visit me at the U with a few Zip disks of stuff we'd load them up in my Zip drive to copy all of the stuff off. And wait...

And wait...

And wait...

Steve would be dreaming of his own Zip drive that filled his disks in minutes while we'd be waiting for half hour or more for each of those things to empty themselves on to my computer. Needless to say, Steve, who never gets bitter about anything, would get a little bitter about the whole situation--and certainly never brings it up these days.

You may be asking, why are you bringing this up? What made you even think of it?

Yesterday I was handed a 250MB Zip disk and told to copy a presentation off of it for so-and-so-1 and let him know where I saved it on the network. And that so-and-so-2 has a 250 MB Zip drive, so I can use that.

I go up to #2 to borrow the drive and while he's disconnecting it from his computer I notice that it is parallel port, not a good sign. So I think, okay, it's just a presentation, maybe it's small and they used a 250MB disk because it was all they had.

I get the drive hooked up and the software installed (not automatic detection via USB for this drive!), reboot, and browse to the disk. Yikes, the presentation is about 120MB, this is going to take a while. There are a bunch of other files on the disk which I copy off quickly and then start on the big one. It starts going and after a little bit stops with a cyclic redundancy error. Another not good sign. So I try again and it starts copying normally. While it's going my computer slows to a crawl, the crawl of a three-toed sloth encased in a glacier. So I sit there staring at the non-work-related presentation being copied using ancient Zip technology. It keeps going for a while and suddenly, when it gets to the "8 minutes remaining" point the drive clicks, the time jumps back to "10 minutes remaining", and then proceeds to click every 10 seconds or so. Ouch. I stop it, make sure I have the latest drivers, reboot and try again. The same thing happens.

The urge to pitch the disk and drive through the small window in my office was quickly subdued.

Luckily, I don't really care if the presentation gets copied or not, because if I did care I'd be stressed out, because it's not going to get copied. (I don't think that sentence is grammatically correct, there seems to be too many instances of the word 'because', but I don't know how to otherwise get across what I mean to say)

That's my story. The moral? Start using a CD burner or USB key and then have your friends throw you a party to welcome you to the year 2004.