It's time to buy a CD-R drive. Backing up has become a nightmare and I do it much too infrequently. I've thought about getting an easy to use external USB drive, but it appears that these drives are not supported under NT 4.0, so I either install it myself or have the local shop do it. I suppose I could upgrade to Win2000 or WinXP, but it's not worth it. I would much rather be running Linux but there is one critical application, ArcView, that I use for all mapping projects, that isn't supported under Linux.

The specs on the internal drives indicate that they are much faster than the external, but they're obviously much less portable. I could try to install it myself but don't want to hassle with it. Guess I better back everything up before heading to the shop.

Interesting article on Programming Horror Stories reference on Camworld. Brings back old memories of all the old computers on which I used to work: the Perkin-Elmer with the washing machine-like disk drives and the disk packs that looked like those old hair driers that women used to sit under. If you tilted it wrong the platters would be ruined. Or the Amdahl, programming JCL on punch cards, or the Prime, and then the VAX that we all fell in love with because it was so much more friendly then all the rest. Then the ill-fated DataGeneral Aviions that we were forced to buy because they low-bid the Suns that we all wanted. Then suddenly we had workstations on our desk running Windows.

posted by Bruce Wright at 8:36 AM #