Elder Brother was considered the brightest of us three siblings, regardless of the fact that he completed the least amount of formal education - a year of graduate school in Chemical Engineering. Thus, I am always confident in asking advice from him. It is bound to be great - right? Ah, yes. Sometimes we agree on the approach to solving a problem; there are times when we are far apart. A few days ago, during a phone call, EB gave me input that was somewhere in-between.
Trying to get more junk out of our house, Hunky Husband had allowed me to relieve his den/workout rooms of 8-9 empty cardboard boxes. While I was at it, he threw in a couple of boxes full of junk. Among the junk was an external ZIP drive, about which I was ignorant. I had known he had, some years ago, used an external hard drive: I had not known that it was a ZIP drive, nor would I have known what that was. I'm still not clear on the concept, but it is obvious that the 3.5" floppy disks that the drive uses are slightly different from the standard 3.5" floppy disk (see photo, below.)
Problem? I intend to box up the drive and the unused floppies and take them to the electronic recycle people in Wichita. I wanted to destroy the floppies on which HH had backed up his hard drive. What's the easy way to destroy floppies? It's having been at least 10-15 years since last I destroyed floppies; I don't recall what I did at that time. I do recall that we shredded floppies with an industrial shredder on classified programs, then burned the bits of confetto. HH suggested that I remove the sliding metal closeout of each floppy and put the medium through our cross-cut shredder. Hmmm...I don't know. That leaves the metal disk at the center. I don't wish to put our residential shredder to that task. I'll go with the brute force method of getting at the medium.
First disk: Insert screwdriver through the central hole, pry up at each corner to separate the two plastic halves, and shred the medium.
Second Disk: Insert screwdriver through central hole, pry up, insert long needle-nose plier through the central hole, pull out medium and shred it.
Third Disk: Insert screwdriver through central hole, pry up at the two corners away from the sliding metal to break attachments, insert needle-nose plier into gap in the side, pull out medium and shred it.
I've one more disk to shred* but have yet to come up with another way of brute forcing the medium out of the case. (Perhaps use a hammer?) Mom always assured me that there were multiple ways of skinning cats. Unfortunately, she's not around to see me apply her adage.
The photo, below, shows what will be taken to the e-cycle people.
There was a price for all of the fun I had devising different ways of destroying stuff: my unattended spaghetti sauce made a mess in the kitchen.
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*ADDITION of 1/24/2022 - OMG
One box among those HH gave me for disposal, the innocent looking box in the photo below, contained a surprise: more disks.
These disks are just regular 3.5" floppy disks, rather than ZIP disks. Fortunately, only four of them need to be shredded. Some were blank. Most were used by HH for benign information concerning his volunteer service with an NGO providing disaster response. [HH served on over 50 disasters, including the responses to several hurricanes, among them Hurricane Katrina and to even more tornados, among them EF-5 tornados in Greensburg KS (1.7 miles wide, wiping out 95% of the town of nearly 1600 people - 2007) and Joplin MO (ranked as deadliest tornado in US history at the time - 2011- with 158 direct deaths and 8 more related deaths). HH was supposed to have been the originating director at Greensburg KS but came down with a virus just a couple of hours before he was to leave home - not before he had dispatched me to Topeka KS to provide liaison in the State Emergency Operation Center - my first large disaster. HH did, indeed, work in Joplin directing the operation - just not as the originating director. When the original call came, he was tied up in Reading KS on a small disaster training a new director of operations. OTOH, I was sent to Kansas City MO to provide liaison with FEMA.]
But, wait...there's more! That thin, long, black "thing" is the battery to a laptop. At first, I assumed it was the "lost" spare battery to the Toshiba that I shipped off to Elder Brother a few months ago; but, no, it is to HH's HP Envy laptop. That made me give the box another look. It was the box in which HH's Envy had arrived - back in 2015. The battery is now appropriately bagged in its anti-static sleeve, labeled, and ensconced in a storage compartment above the said laptop.
My favorite has been use of a hammer. Nice way to relieve frustrations. However, then you run the risk of sharp plastic pieces flying all over the place.
Posted by: bogie | January 23, 2022 at 05:19 AM
Bogie--Your point is well taken. A hammer for the 4th disk, it is. That's one good use for a shop towel, placing one over the object being hit. A gunny sack works, too.
Posted by: Cop Car | January 23, 2022 at 06:59 AM
Wow, I still have some Zip discs. Must see if I have a drive somewhere . In the attic maybe?
Posted by: Ole Phat Stu | January 24, 2022 at 05:48 PM
Stu--I can send you one ; )
Posted by: Cop Car | January 25, 2022 at 05:26 AM
Stu--Seriously, if you want this drive, you are welcome to it. Otherwise, it gets e-cycled. (Or...if any other relative/friend/blog friend/passer-by wants it, you would be welcome to take it off of my hands. I hate to see things go to waste.) As far as I can tell, there is no COVID-caused disruption of shipping via USPS to Germany.
Posted by: Cop Car | January 25, 2022 at 09:56 AM
What Interfaces does your drive have? USB? Parallel port?
Let me look in my attic first, don't throw it away before the weekend, I may take you up on your offer.
Posted by: Stu | January 25, 2022 at 02:06 PM
It uses a 25-pin parallel port connector. Please see further addition to posting. Belay that. I'm adding a posting for further photos of what is available.
Posted by: Cop Car | January 26, 2022 at 05:16 AM
Thanks for your offer, CC, but I've destroyed my 3 ZIP discs,
see my latest posting , also for a photo of a 10 MB disc from the late 1960s :-)
Posted by: Ole Phat Stu | January 26, 2022 at 10:20 AM
You are welcome, as would be any other "takers".
That is a rather large disk that you show, Stu. Is that really a disk or is it tape?
With what computer were you working when you ran up against such disks? The largest I ever worked with were 8" diameter disks. Before that, it was all tape. In fact, in my last big computer-dependent project at Cessna in the early 1990s, the main-frame was using tape. I used the disaster pack to enable running my model. I think I've told you about that case in which I had to store the results of running the first part of the program and start the second part of the program using the results as input. The computer department didn't have enough capability to make the run as a whole nor enough regular storage to accommodate my program (NASTRAN 64? Super-Element model of a Cessna II series airplane). It was fortunate that we had no intervening disaster requiring use of their disaster pack. Talk about being up a creek.
Cessna has made a lot of money off of that project, by saving a lot of testing. We certified a post-manufacturing major modification to the airframe using modeling for all conditions, except cyclic pressurization, for stress substantiation. I digress. 🤷♀️
BTW: It turned out that, to me, the simplest way of destroying the disks was the third method in the posting - popping up two corners & grabbing the medium with the needle-nosed pliers.
Posted by: Cop Car | January 26, 2022 at 12:43 PM
Yes, I think that's a platter from an IBM 350 RAMAC disc stack.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive#/media/File:IBM_350_RAMAC.jpg
IBM invented the disc drive in 1952/3 afaik.
The removable Winchester disk pack was invented much later, about 1972, I believe.
In the 1960s we used Univac 1108s and HUGE drums as tall as a man for a fault tolerant database at London Heathrow Cargo tracking. I was with CSC at the time.
As a student I used the ATLAS at London University, at the time the largest in the world as I remember. Virtual memory which paged from TAPE (1 inch wide with addressable blocks). Don't get me reminescing ;-)
Posted by: Ole Phat Stu | January 26, 2022 at 03:02 PM
I haven't seen "CSC" for a while. Interesting about IBM's having invented disc drives before I was introduced to computers in 1959. When I was a student, there were no computers or even terminals to computers on campus. They broke ground for a building to house a computer at about the time HH was graduated and we left that school (January 1959). I think I was in graduate school (1971 or 1972) when we students had access to computational terminals to a mainframe at Wichita State U. By 1974, when I went back to work at Boeing, I had hands-on access to a hybrid digital/analog computer and IBM card access to the mainframe digital computer and flatbed plotters. You were much more into computers, while I was basically a user who did programming only as a part of my job as a dynamicist.
Yes, Stu, let that reminiscing provide us more reading - at your blog. 🤓
Posted by: Cop Car | January 26, 2022 at 04:48 PM