Hi, My Name is Merry and I'm a Technoholic

So, Annie, this is the blog post I promised several days ago. I love hard drives. All sizes, prices, colors and capacities. But let's back up a little. We got our first computer, and Apple2+, in 1982. We had a family discussion about whether we should spend the money. Our kids unanimously said they felt it was a bad idea and would take up our family time. (If any of y'all don't believe me, I have a record of the discussion in my journal.) We wound up getting the computer anyway. It cost us $6000.00 and consisted of a teensy little monitor, the computer (I can't even remember what that looked like!), and an Epson tractor-feed dot matrix printer that weighed about a ton. There was a drive to put a 5 and a quarter inch floppy disc in to run programs. Soon we were all experts at Snack Attack, Sea Fox, Space Invaders, and kids, do ya'll remember Sticky Bear Bop? How about Burger Time and Pie Man? Good times, good times! I became so addicted to all things computer that I decided that since I already had a tax i.d. from being a Brite Music Distributer, I would become a virtual computer store, and voila, Southland Micro Products was born! I was right in my element. Those were early days of home computers, Apple User Groups, etc. When we left for Germany in 1985, Denny Sorenson asked if he could be Southland Micro Products. I said yes. Not long after arriving in Heidelbert, we decided to join the big boys and get a Mac. Wow! No more 5 1/4 floppies for us! Enter 3 1/2 in floppies. How techie is that! Fast forward to 1990 when we retired to Mobile, and it was obvious that the 3 1/2 floppy was here to stay. I started doing genealogy and loaded the DOS-version of PAF on our computer. More floppies. We gave in the the internet, and I fell in love with user-groups. And saved messages, etc, on ... wait for it...... floppies. I kept my floppies in supercool floppie holders. I had several. The years passed by and my floppy collection grew. Somewhere along the way, we discovered exterior hard drives. Huge cumbersome things, but so much memory! So I began to load floppy info onto the exterior hard drive. Each hard drive had a cord, a transformer? and another cord. They were heavy. But they held huge amounts of data. The last one that I bought holds 250 Gigabytes! So. Back in 2006 I bought my laptop, customized just for me. I even made sure that it had a plug and play A-drive for my beloved floppies. Fast forward to 2010. That was when I was browsing on Amazon and found this little puppy: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003HFG0U4/ref=oss_product Can you believe it? Neither could I. 500 gigabytes in an attractive little package not much bigger than an IPhone! And it's plug and play to boot! I had to have it. And so I did! and do... I plan to store all my data on it. Which brings me back to my floppie collection. It traveled with me to Saratoga Springs, to the Palladio and to Wasatch Manor, where I finally had to admit that it is time to lose the floppies. So so sad. But I did it! Saturday night I spent the evening downloading and discarding all my floppies. I was unhappy to find that probably 3/4 of my floppies were incompatible with my laptop. But I kept a stiff upper lip and through em all away. I actually felt liberated when I finished! Today I have my old dinosaur 250g exterior hard drive and my wonderful little green friend both hooked into my laptop and I am busy transferring files. The cool thing is that I have found lots of things I thought were lost forever! Now they all live on my little green guy. As is the habit of Jim and me, I really must name my little green machine. So, it is Kermit. And now you know the story of how I happen to be a Technoholic. Hope they have good refreshments at the support group meetings!
Over and out!