Rescuing Leonard Nimoy

Back at the end of July, the San Jose Mercury News ran an article written by columnist Chris O’Brien about the ephemeral nature of digital storage media and the high risk of losing irreplaceable files such as photos and videos if you don’t move the files to newer media. Days later, while cleaning out my computer hutch in preparation for giving my home-based techno-writing business (Have blog, will travel) a better home than the recliner chair in my living room, I stumbled upon two bright red 3.5-inch floppy disks with some cryptic markings. Even though the markings were cryptic, I immediately knew what each disk contained. Each 1.44-Mbyte “high-density” floppy contained one “hi-res” image showing me sitting at a desk with Leonard Nimoy. Not a cardboard cutout of Leonard Nimoy. Not some lookalike pretending to be Leonard Nimoy. The real Leonard Nimoy. Mr. Spock, Star Fleet commander and first officer of the Starship Enterprise. That Leonard Nimoy.

Instantly, the story of how I came to be in a Burbank TV studio, sitting behind a desk with Leonard Nimoy snapped into my head. It all started while I was in charge of The Microprocessor Report back in early 2001. Reed-Elsevier, which owns EDN, had recently purchased the publication and we were co-located with other Reed properties in Silicon Valley. Kathleen Doler, then editor of EDN’s sister publication Electronic Business, popped her head into my office one day and asked me if I could jet down to Burbank to act as the technology expert for a TV show on touch screens. The show starred Leonard Nimoy. I said, “Let me think about that for a nanosecond. Yes!”

Eventually, I was on the phone with the producer of The Next Wave with Leonard Nimoy, a pay-for-play infomercial show that bought air time from CNBC and charged companies to appear in 10-minute “news” segments about their product category. I told the producer, with all the confidence I could muster, that I could indeed act as an expert in touch screens.

“We’re shooting another segment that day too on e-commerce. Are you an expert in that?”

“You betcha,” I replied.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m in expert in trans-dimensional warp-drive theory including the detailed history of Zefram Cochrane—and on brain surgery, solar-powered water reclamation, orbital dynamics, set theory, game theory, the Bernoulli principle, and any other technology or science, real or imagined—if it gets me on camera with Leonard Nimoy, the man who launched 100,000 scientists and engineers with his portrayal of the galaxy’s most logical, most famous man of science and engineering.

That’s how I got to “spend” the day with Leonard Nimoy in a Burbank TV studio. That’s how I ended up with those two red floppy disks, each just large enough to hold the 1.2-Mbyte photo shot by the show’s still photographer using a Sony Mavica.

So how can I read a floppy these days? Among myself, my wife, and my daughter, we have four operational PCs and not one of those PCs has a floppy drive. The thought of a storage device with less than 1.5 Mbytes of storage is downright silly these days. Yet less than a decade ago that was the storage standard. No thumb drives. Floppies.

It’s still not too late, I thought. I checked eBay for USB floppy drives. They’re down below ten bucks these days. I can afford that. Then I checked MicroCenter, a small computer store chain that originated in Ohio but with a local bricks-and-mortar presence in Santa Clara. They only wanted $14.99. Sold. I stopped in Santa Clara on the way back home from a client visit, made the purchase, and drove home. I plugged in the drive. Windows XP recognized it in seconds. I popped in the disk with one of the photos. Here’s what I saw:

What do you have that needs saving? Anything older than about 10 years is at risk. It’s time to bring those files into the present. Rest assured that you’ll be doing this again in 10 years.

Live long, and prosper.