Untitled.
23 August 1999
![[ ]](http://mbpix.mushroom.net/19990823y.png)
i started trying to clean and organize the piles of junk that have built up over the last few years, a little bit every time i've been home for a month or two. it's a daunting task. i've got a lot of stuff. books, clothes, old papers, computer equipment, etc, etc. but it's something i s'pose i should do.
a couple days ago, i tried once again to get some old software of my mac se. i had tried the morning that i left for texas, but couldn't get the floppy drive to work and gave up, got in my car, and drove off. so the other day, i decided to try again. the first thing that i noticed, was that the computer thinks that there is a disk in the drive whether there is or not. which means that unless there really is a disk in the drive, an "unreadable disk" message keeps popping up. so i had to find a disk that it could read (not easy 'cause it's an old 800k drive). but eventually i did, and tried to copy some stuff to it, and it seemed to be working.
but when i took that disk to any other computer, it would claim it was unreadable. so the next idea was to hook up an external hard drive to the se, copy the contents of its drive (only 20 megs worth), and then plug the external into another computer. i tried to boot it up a couple of times, but the se wouldn't recognize the external drive. i was beginning to think that i was going to have to take the se apart (for which you need a special tool, that i don't have), take the hard drive out, and plug it into my g3. and probably fry my g3 in the process.
but, as a last ditch effort i decided to try my mom's external zip drive. to get this to work though, i'd need one of the zip disks that come with the drives on it. the problem is, people tend to erase those disks for general use, 'cause the drivers are included in most new standard system installations anyway. so i copied the driver off of sam's computer (which i was sure probably wouldn't even be backward compatible with my se) and had some more floppy troubles in transferring, but finally was able to. booted up the se, everything seemed to be working, and then as soon as it tries to read the zip disk it had a huge system error. flashing screen, buzzing sounds, and all that. (i'd take it over a windoze blue-screen any day.)
so i try booting without the zip disk in the drive, and then putting it in after startup was complete. and what do you know? it worked. so i copied the entire contents of my hard disk to a zip disk, shut down, and unplugged everything.
so what i got out of the deal, a bunch of old games, including some that i had hacked to have my own interfaces. old hypercard stacks, fractal stuff and such. and what i was really after all along, an old go program. it's not the strongest playing program available, but i still think it has one of the nicest interfaces if seen in a go program. very clean and simple.
and so today i copied the go program on to tangerine (my laptop), giving it an actually vaguely useful feature.
a couple days ago, i tried once again to get some old software of my mac se. i had tried the morning that i left for texas, but couldn't get the floppy drive to work and gave up, got in my car, and drove off. so the other day, i decided to try again. the first thing that i noticed, was that the computer thinks that there is a disk in the drive whether there is or not. which means that unless there really is a disk in the drive, an "unreadable disk" message keeps popping up. so i had to find a disk that it could read (not easy 'cause it's an old 800k drive). but eventually i did, and tried to copy some stuff to it, and it seemed to be working.
but when i took that disk to any other computer, it would claim it was unreadable. so the next idea was to hook up an external hard drive to the se, copy the contents of its drive (only 20 megs worth), and then plug the external into another computer. i tried to boot it up a couple of times, but the se wouldn't recognize the external drive. i was beginning to think that i was going to have to take the se apart (for which you need a special tool, that i don't have), take the hard drive out, and plug it into my g3. and probably fry my g3 in the process.
but, as a last ditch effort i decided to try my mom's external zip drive. to get this to work though, i'd need one of the zip disks that come with the drives on it. the problem is, people tend to erase those disks for general use, 'cause the drivers are included in most new standard system installations anyway. so i copied the driver off of sam's computer (which i was sure probably wouldn't even be backward compatible with my se) and had some more floppy troubles in transferring, but finally was able to. booted up the se, everything seemed to be working, and then as soon as it tries to read the zip disk it had a huge system error. flashing screen, buzzing sounds, and all that. (i'd take it over a windoze blue-screen any day.)
so i try booting without the zip disk in the drive, and then putting it in after startup was complete. and what do you know? it worked. so i copied the entire contents of my hard disk to a zip disk, shut down, and unplugged everything.
so what i got out of the deal, a bunch of old games, including some that i had hacked to have my own interfaces. old hypercard stacks, fractal stuff and such. and what i was really after all along, an old go program. it's not the strongest playing program available, but i still think it has one of the nicest interfaces if seen in a go program. very clean and simple.
and so today i copied the go program on to tangerine (my laptop), giving it an actually vaguely useful feature.