Permission is granted to make one printed copy for personal/non-commercial use only.
Permission is granted to make one copy and one backup copy on electronic storage media, for personal/non-commercial use only, as long as these electronically stored copies are accessible to a single personal computer only, and are not accesible from a network of any kind, including the Internet and World Wide Web.
Any reproduction of this material must include this copyright notice.
Written permission from the author is required for further reproduction, by any method.
I don't know what got into me. The moon wasn't full. My score on the short test for the onset of incipient dementia was low. There was no apparent reason for the act which followed. I had decided to reorganize my floppy diskettes. The next day, after I was well into the inexplicable aberration, I got my Voice in the mail, with Lynn Lanning's disk management article. Karma.
First came a trip to Egghead to buy another Allsop Convenient Desktop Disk Organizer. Convenient Desktop Disk Organizer is an oxymoron. There is nothing convenient about organizing floppy diskettes. I also bought a game, Mission Thunderbolt. The dementia test must have missed something, because I don't buy games. Maybe that was it. I had been uneasy, restless. The game was a response to that, and to load the game on my hard disk I would have to clean out seven megs for it, and that meant I would have to take some things off of my hard disk and back them up onto floppies, hence, the urge to reorganize my floppy diskettes. That makes perfect sense to me. --- I wonder what the long test for the onset of incipient dementia would show?
I don't have just one kind of diskette storage box, or even two. There are the plastic thirty diskette boxes, Allsop and other brands, and the double wide eighty diskette boxes. I have one wooden storage box with a roll top lid that I got one Christmas. I've got some plastic boxes that Fuji sold diskettes in when when they were trying to break into the market. (Now that Fuji's firmly established in the diskette trade no more nice plastic boxes.) I also had a stack of the cardboard boxes that diskettes are sold in. I have also experimented with the new, radical, fluid, natural diskette management method --- I stack them up loose on every semi-flat surface within arms reach of my chair. I would like to believe that I am as progressive as the next person but the sheer numbers of diskettes piled up on top of my shelves, desk, and speakers made it evident that the decision to revamp my diskette organizational/disorganizational structure had come none too soon.
First things first. I started pulling diskettes out of boxes and stacking them on the floor. I couldn't stack them on top of my desk because that's my software manual, bill, cat, and magazine holding area. It seemed simple enough. I would stack them by category, application software in one quadrant, originals on the left, backups on the right, word processors and text editors, spell/checker thesari grouped together, language compilers in their own area, drawing programs --- communication programs --- games --- music software --- utilities --------- uh oh! The floor was full, and I hadn't even gotten past applications to system software, backups, documents, or disks of the month. I moved into the living room, chasing cats ahead of me.
My five cats are, of course, a great help in endeavors such as this and they had no shortage of suggestions, no sooner thought than acted upon, about which diskette ought to go in what pile. But they were no match for me. I moved with ruthless and mechanical precision, until, having been convinced of my complete insanity (which they have long suspected), they moved into the kitchen. When I approached the linoleumed floor they stood their ground with implacable feline obstinancy. With thoughts of the several ways a cat could ruin a floppy diskette I altered my course, sorting, and stacking, and arranging, through the living room and toward the bedrooms.
My wife took her stand there. She had a broom. A handful of floppy diskettes is no match for a broom. "Out!" she cried, and swept away a stack of diskettes that had encroached into her hallway. Still I needed more room. I couldn't seem to make logical groupings. Sometimes it seemed that every disk was a category unto itself, and each category meant another pile, another quarter of a square foot of precious real estate. Out the front door I went and onto the walkway, down the stairs and into the courtyard. I pondered briefly if it would be worth the trouble to drain the pool. The cascade of neglected diskettes seemed unending. When I first moved into the courtyard a neighbor would occasionally come in the back gate and glance curiously in my direction. By the time I had the space half filled they were muttering curses at me and making the sign of the cross. Once I had filled the entire courtyard there was not a soul to be seen. The entire complex seemed to be deserted, except for fearful shadowed eyes peering out through tentatively parted Venetian blinds.
I was about to move into the alley when the bulldozer pulled up outside. There were rumblings from some of the apartments, and down the corridor, at the other end of the complex, I could make out torches and pitchforks. I looked back at the colorful mosaic of three and one half inch plastic squares spread out behind me. All my years of disk pack-ratting were in danger. I thought quickly. How to turn all the piles into one or two big piles that could be neatly and quickly hidden away. There must be a way. --- There was! I didn't need every MacValley Anti-Viral disketted I had collected over the past four years. I didn't need the past six minor revs of FullWrite, or MacDraw, or Think Pascal, or MacroMind. Half of the stuff I had on diskette wouldn't run under System 7 anway. I ran upstairs and grabbed several pillow cases. I dumped all of the obsolete diskettes into one, and ------ found that there was hardly anything else left. I ran upstairs, the pillow case slung over my shoulder with a handful of still current diskettes clutched to my breast. As I raced into my apartment the angry mob burst into the courtyard. "Sanctuary!" I cried. "Sanctuary!"
The last chapter of my story of disk reorganization is less eventful. I collected all of my obsolete diskettes into one storage bin to be reused as needed. At the monthly MacValley meeting I pick up the disk of the month with Loodle, and used it to catalog my remaining diskettes. I soon found that most of my backups were redundant. I really didn't need fifteen diskettes with various untraceable versions of a single play, so I simply made sure that I had current backups of all my work, and put the rest into the obsolete diskette bin. Slowly, methodically I went through all of my diskettes, repeating, refining, and culling out every duplication. I now have one, single, diskette placed carefully in the topmost storage box of the many storage boxes piled on the shelves beside me. The other diskettes, all obsolete and ready to be reused as soon as I need them, are all packed away neatly into large U-Haul boxes filling my closet.
Fuji, Kodak, Sony and Maxell tried to suppress this story. They are afraid that if word of my diskette organization methods gets out they will never sell another floppy diskette. I don't think they have to worry. When I back up this story do you think it's going on one of my recycled diskettes? Why would I want to put a new story on a used diskette? Get real.
Gregg Writes
MacValley Voice Articles
| Yagottahavits | 2020 Vision | I Am A System Extension | Clairvoyance |
| Virtuality | Online! | Compression | FlopOrganization |
Contact me by e-mail. You are FlopOrganization reader