Technology Refresh

date:2007-01-04 19:03:01 category:Macintosh

First, I’m a pack-rat; I worry about deleting something valuable. Specifically, I worry about orphaned files because the application software is no longer supported or the media is obsolete.

For example, my resume is a Hypercard stack. Really. Hypercard is an OS 9 application, and future OS X’s won’t support it anymore. However, I have an old disk drive with an OS9 and Hypercard. Consequently, I can’t consider erasing that disk drive.

For years, I’ve had a TODO list item for designing a resume DTD, unwinding the Hypercard stack into that DTD, and ditching Hypercard entirely. I’d have to maintain my resume as a massive XML database, but that’s not all bad.

This also means that I have old computers laying around. The current home network update shows an embarrassing surplus of home computers. Here’s one plan.

1. Ditch the old slot-loading iMac. It has a 10Gb drive, is G3 PPC, and S L O W. It’s land-fill material unless someone offers me $50 for it.
2. Move the current desk-lamp iMac out to pasture as the fall-back machine. It’s G4, so it isn’t as slow. And it’s PPC, so it runs Hypercard until I get my act together to extract my resume from Hypercard.
3. Start making more use of the MacBook that I had to buy as part of the $1,503.65 Coffee and MacBook experience.

However, I give up the big keyboard and big display. Tough choice.