Now I can act a bit cocky. Nyah, nyah. I got all my old data back online. Wasn't easy, but then again that's why they used to pay me the big bucks. I even went overboard and fired up one of my old sun-3 system disks. I don't have an operating system currently that can read that format, but I pulled the data - the entire disk - into one big file. By scanning with a text editor I can find the useful data therein. One of these days I'll get really brave and try and load in some of my old floppies. Most of those are probably deceased by now. Floppies have about a three year life span (up to about ten in a humidity controlled environment, which these weren't in) and most of those files are well beyond that anyway (like 15-20 years). But I did manage to duplicate most of the important stuff. One copy might still survive if the disks aren't 100% oxidized yet. But it's really questionable whether old DOS and Commodore-64 files have any meaning today. There isn't much important data there, mostly old programming projects. But I think it might be fun to take the old Crossroads BBS or Radio Free California and rewrite them for the web.

In fact, I already re-wrote the Xroads for Unix, but I don't think I can read that media anymore. It's an 8-mm data tape. That's OK, it was pretty easy. Made an English language internet portal more or less. Mail, news, chat, file swapping, private clubs, etc. Lockheed was using it for a while for a technical chat line. Started out as a dial in phone bulletin board with an English language parser in about 1400 lines of BASIC, and was amazingly good. 'Hey bozo, get my new mail' or 'I wanna' write a private message to katy, and btw, has she read the message I sent yesterday?'. No error messages. Anything wrong was the fault of the computer to do as you asked, and not a fault of the person using it. It would just do nothing and let you try again. But it always did pretty much whatever you asked. Oh well, those were the days huh?

Anyway, not today. I'm gonna' button up this case and then undo all the system services I disabled to get the SCSI drives working. Get this huge pile of hard drives and old interface cards off my bedroom floor. Then put all the data on CD so it will hopefully survive the next upgrade.

Wow! Made $1.01 in tips today. Wonder if I'll get in trouble if I don't record it somewhere...

End of the sniper story, but the media will probably carry it for months. Coupla' small time thugs who know how to shoot get their fifteen minutes of fame. Can we just leave it at that? Do we have to find all their old childhood sweethearts to say that they had no idea and listen to all the trial details and try and figure out why these guys went nuts? It's way easy. Killed somebody in a poorly executed robbery and that gave them the taste of blood. Their days of freedom were already numbered. Might as well go out with a bang (so to speak). End of story. Yawn. Next...