iOMeGa!

I've been digging through my shite recently and among other things found a box with my old Iomega Zip-100 drive in it. This thing is relatively ancient. I mean this is pre-USB. It connected to the computer via parallel port. In the box also was about a dozen zip disks. And what's more, there was stuff on it that I had absolutely no clue if I had backed up or transferred to any other hard-drives. What to do, what to do. I did NOT want install drivers on my Windows system which is polluted enough as it is. Well, my freshly minted Ubuntu install was up and the computer it was on had a parallel port, so why not? I began looking up info about these parallel port zip drives for use with Ubuntu. I recall a decade ago getting it to work with my Toshiba running Red Hat (I think it was 5) and having to do some insmod's and ppa's and using mtools and the like; basically I remember it requiring some work. After finding an appropriate page I hooked it up.

OMG! Without doing anything else, up pops the ZIP-100 icon on my desktop and a Nautilus window with the contents. I utterly did not expect that. That rocked. I mean, who uses parallel ports to attach devices these days, outside of perhaps a legacy printer much less a block device? It's not so much that I expected it to not work easily but even with Windows I expected having to download some drivers or installs or something. Way to go Ubuntu!

It's amusing to consider how my stack of zip disks and the reader fit can all fit on my keychain via a USB key now. Those things were destined to go the way of the floppy; in fact I think the floppy outlived them. I don't think I ever liked them but for a few years I must admit that they were indeed practical. In light of the MiniDisc, I still think zip disks should never have existed. But for now, I'm just stoked that practically no effort I got it connected and was able to move all of that data off. I now look forward to getting rid of the beasties. The fact that it worked so effortlessly almost made me want to keep it around for amusement. Almost. Now to figure out the most consciencious way to purge it from my possessions.