Tucked away on a shelf in a dark corner of our study, a row of ZIP disks have hidden for the last decade. They have moved house with us, and survived multiple clearouts. I don’t know why I’ve hung on to them over the years, but I have.
Perhaps an explanation of what a “ZIP Disk” is might be in order. Think back about 15 years. USB was in it’s infancy, nobody used external hard drives, and flash memory didn’t exist. The most common form of portable storage was the 1.5 floppy disketteeach of which help 1.44Mb of data. To give you some idea, I have a 16Gb memory stick on my keyringit stores the same amount as over 11 thousand floppy disks. ZIP disks helped a littlethey could store 100Mb of dataabout the same as 70 floppy disks. Not quite as good as today’s memory sticks, but impressive for their time.
So I have a stash of these ZIP disks. I have no idea what’s on them. Photos of friends? Backups from the company I worked for? Software development projects? Half written short stories? I really have no idea.
While digging through the attic earlier this evening, I found the old ZIP drive. At first I was euphoric, and anticipated spending the rest of the evening pouring over the long forgotten disks. Then I noticed the wire for the ZIP drive had a parallel connector on it. I haven’t seen a parallel port on a computer for at least seven years Damn! Something deep in my memory reminded me however that there had been a later model of the ZIP drive that used USBso off to EBay I went.
I found a guy selling exactly the thing I was looking forretrieved from his atticand put a ridiculously low bid in.
I won.
So, at some point next week, a parcel will arrive through the post, and I will vanish into the study to hopefully reclaim whatever is on the mystery disks. Here’s hoping they have survived their decade in obscurity, and will reveal their secrets when asked.