Apollo 13

One of my favorite movies is "Apollo 13." It is an engineer's movie because they are the ones that safely get the astronauts back to earth.

One of the critical scenes has the engineers trying to figure out a way to power up the spacecraft so they don't burn too much power. Turning something on draws more power than once you get it going. The idea in the movie was to find the correct order to power up all the systems and not go over a specific number of amps. On Friday I had a problem that reminded me of "Apollo 13."

My Dad owns an advertising agency and wanted to show a new client something that he did for a previous client. Unfortunately the old information was stored on an Iomega ZIP drive. Back before flash drives, there were floppy disks or CD disks. Floppy disks were limited to 1.44 megabytes of storage. If you had a large file to give someone, you either had to burn a CD or split it up onto several different floppies. Then along came Iomega with a removable disk that could hold 100 megabytes. It was a great solution at the time and it seemed everyone had one.

As luck would have it, I still have an Iomega ZIP drive that is connected to a computer. The computer is on its last leg and so it stays turned off most of the time. It is an old Mac still running Mac OS 8.6. I powered up the dinosaur and was able to read my Dad's ZIP disk just fine. Then came the problem of getting the files from the old Mac onto something a bit more modern.

The Mac has FTP software that works pretty good. Unfortunately I don't have a computer in my office that still uses FTP. All of my servers have been locked down tight for security reasons and require secure FTP or SFTP. I tried openning up a firewall on one of them but was unsuccessful.

There were too many files to just e-mail and so that wasn't an option. The Mac has a CD ROM burner and so that was the method we decided to use to transfer the files. The only problem was that everything had to be turned on in the correct order or the machine froze. I shut down the computer, turned on the ZIP drive, and turned on the computer. Oops, I didn't eject my Dad's disk from the ZIP drive and so the machine hung. I ejected the disk and hit the reset button.

Now the computer was telling me it wasn't shut down properly and so I had to turn off all extensions and try to restart it again. I did what it told me and then restarted the machine. Oops, restart no longer works on that machine. I have to shut it down and then turn it back on manually. So I hit the reset button again and had to go through several iterations of turning on and off the computer.

Finally I got the computer to boot propery. It was time to burn the files to a CD. I identified the files to burn and clicked on the "Burn" button. The drive ejected its tray and asked for a blank disk. I inserted one only to have the computer hang. My CD burner was so old that it didn't recognize the new blank disk. Time to hit the reset button and go through several more iterations of turning off and on the machine.

I have some old re-writable CDs that came with the burner when I bought it close to a decade ago. I gave one of those a try and it finally worked. My Dad had his files from his old ZIP disk. Now that I figured out the sequence, I should try and copy all my old information off several zip disks before my system stops working completely. Judging from the hoops I had to jump through to get it to work, it probably won't be that long.