U.S. Campus Life The second coming By Masako Yamada	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
ひん死のマック、奇跡の復活 奇跡の復活をとげた筆者のマック。

About half a year ago, I wrote about the demise of my loyal Macintosh Centris. It had faithfully served as my primary computer for eight years, from the time I entered college in September 1993 until the time it decided to stop working in August 2001.

The Mac had moved with me from dorm room to dorm room, apartment to apartment. It finally broke down when I decided to move it from one desk to another within the same room. My guess Is that "old age" had caused the computer to slowly degrade, and when I moved the computer, one of the wires or connections finally broke.

I wasn't so concerned about not having a computer: I have another computer at home, and I work in a computer lab at school. The saddest thing about the death of my Mac was that I couldn't access all of the files that I had stored onto my hard drive. I had invested so much time into the work stored on my Mac, I came to think of it not just as a pile of metal and silicon, but as a part of myself.

Perhaps for this reason, people have shown an inordinate amount of concern over the "health" of my computer, as if it were some sick relative. I present some sample responses that I've gotten from ST readers: Reader 1: "I'm a self-titled 'Mac freak' and I've had lots of experience bringing Macs back to life. Please try the following steps to get your computer back up . . .." Reader 2: "Although I'm retired, I've recently started to take computer lessons. The instructors keep on telling me to save my work." Reader 3: "I also have a very old Mac at home, and it has stopped sending and receiving messages. We've gotten a new computer because the Internet helps with my English studies." Reader 4: "Masako, I haven't heard from you in a while. I heard that your computer broke. Is this message getting through?"

My father sent me rebooting software so I could try to reboot my computer using an external floppy disk, but my computer was so old that it couldn't accept this software. He repeated many times his offer to buy me a new computer.

In between summer and now, I switched rooms and I moved the Mac with me to my new room. It took me a while to unpack everything, and it sat on one of my chairs for months without ever being plugged in. It was starting to become a large dust-collector, and I didn't feel like working too hard to salvage my work, so I finally thought I'd throw it away . . . but not without one last attempt to reboot the computer.

BINGO! As soon as I plugged in the computer, I saw that smiley-faced icon. It was as if nothing had changed. All of my files were still there. The computer had stopped working when I had moved it from one place to another, so it's only "logical" that it would start working once it was moved again. I suppose the culprit of my troubles was some loose component.

People have been warning me to save my files on floppy disks as soon as possible, before the computer breaks again. I know they are right. But the funny thing is, while sifting through the files on my Mac, I realized that most of the essays and articles and papers and reviews I've written over the years now seem, well, trivial.

It will probably take over 20 floppy disks for me to save everything. I will do this soon. The question is whether I, or anybody else, will ever touch those floppy disks again. During college, I wrote a daily journal that I saved on floppy disks, and I haven't read the journal since. As a matter of fact, I don't even know where those floppy disks are.

I'm glad that I've been given the opportunity to save my work. But all is not fine-and-dandy. Even after I make those floppy disks, I will have to label their contents and put them in a place I'll remember. And goodness knows how much longer my Mac will survive. Once my computer dies and this type of Mac becomes completely extinct, the floppy disks will become unreadable. People have said, with irony, that the ultimate backup is to print everything out.

Shukan ST: Jan. 18, 2002

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