Just Acquired a 68K Mac? Do a Double-Take Before Making a Big Mistake!

nixgeek · #1 November 25th, 2005, 09:03 PM

Otherwise you'd shoot yourself, like I'm sure this person felt when he discovered the previous owner of his just-won Mac IIfx from eBay. I guess you can get it all on eeeeebaaaaayy!!

http://www.vintagemacworld.com/iifx.html

Now excuse me while I go find my towel.

symphonix · #2 November 26th, 2005, 05:05 AM

This just about had me crying ... to think that you could stumble across Douglas' old Mac and wipe most of the files before realising who the previous owner was is one of the biggest "Whoops" moments I've seen in years. If you've ever read Adams' "Salmon of Doubt" - the post-humously published collection of some of his works - you'll have a good idea of just how much funny, unread material may have been lost in this incident. The Even Greater Meaning of Liff, perhaps? Or the last half of the third Dirk Gently novel? We'll never know.

Its a moment very much in keeping with Adams' sense of humour, though. Reminds me of the race in HHGG that travelled for 10,000 years to attack Earth, only to be eaten by a small dog.

nixgeek · #3 November 26th, 2005, 08:48 AM

Actually, he was able to recover a lot of it, but still. Make you think twice about wiping out those recently acquired old Macs, huh.

kilowatt · #4 November 27th, 2005, 02:49 AM

A friend of mine that works at a rather popular resturant chain was allowed to take home their old computer system when a new one was brought in.

He didn't know much about computers other than that he wanted one. So he took the server over to my house, and I booted it up.

To our surprise, the thing contained every last statistic and record from this resturant over the past 5 years. Employee pay schedules, social security numbers, phone numbers, customer addresses... it was really endless. I made an encrypted copy of the drive images, and installed linux-from-scratch on it.

I don't think I have the drive images anymore, but it was absolutely shocking.