JBMoney 's Blog @ Bressler.org

I've been tossing out PC-related junk over the last year.... obsolete keybords, mice, cords, etc. Anyone who's worked with PC hardware over the years has tales of the unbelievably inadequate hardware they used to work with... at least by today's standards.

External Data storage is one the most easily quantifiable areas of change with which to bring home how far things have come. When I started playing with TRS-80s at school we had cassette tapes and 5 1/4 inch floppy drives. There were also 8 inch floppies around. After that, the 3.5 inch floppy reigned supreme for many years, mostly available with 1.4MB of storage. Eventually the re-recordable CD became the standard with 600MB or more, then re-recordable DVDs with 4GB (4000MB) or more, and now any number of USB & Firewire devices are cheaply available. For less than $30, I can now carry around 32GB on a drive no larger than my thumbnail.

There was a short point in time though (1999ish),  between the dominance of the 3.5 inch floppy and the re-recordable CD, where the next big thing was not so clear. There were a series of portable external drives that were quite popular. In fact, some PC manufacturers (like Dell) bet on the Iomega Zip drive and let folks configure new PCs with an internal version (I have one of these). 

Pictured here are three drives Buffy and I went through during that time, the Iomega Zip (100MB), the Syquest SyJet (scsi 1.5GB) and the Iomega Jaz (scsi 2GB).  I don't miss them or the two pounds of cabling and power cables that you needed to carry around with them.

Jake Holmes, an American Folk-Pop singer dating back to the 60's, is sueing Led Zeppelin. Holmes claims to have written Dazed and Confused. In fact, he released the song on his 1967 album. Also in 1967, Holmes played the song when opening for the Yardbirds in Greenwich village. Yardbirds being the group Jimmy Page was in before Zeppelin. Page has always taken credit as the sole songwriter on Dazed.

After a listen, it sounds like Holmes has a rock-solid case but  I can't imagine letting something like this eat at you for 40 years.... and it obviously had. Page commented on Holmes' grousing in a 1990 interview.

10 years and a life spent mostly in alcoholism and bitterness... maybe... I mean we've all been there right? But 40 YEARS!?!

If successfull, the statute of limitations restricts Homes from recovering anything except royalties for the last three years. Still a tidy sum... but probably a scrap of what he could have been due.

Mark Twain (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer)  left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910 and one of his parting wishes was that they not be published for 100 years.

That time has come.

I'll be working to clear up my unfinished Kindle books before the big day in November, when the first of three volumes is expected to be released. According to The Independent, this should be some good stuff from one of the most (mis)quoted men in American History:

Another potential motivation for leaving the book to be posthumously published concerns Twain's legacy as a Great American. Michael Shelden, who this year published Man in White, an account of Twain's final years, says that some of his privately held views could have hurt his public image.

"He had doubts about God, and in the autobiography, he questions the imperial mission of the US in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. He's also critical of [Theodore] Roosevelt, and takes the view that patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel. Twain also disliked sending Christian missionaries to Africa. He said they had enough business to be getting on with at home: with lynching going on in the South, he thought they should try to convert the heathens down there."

In other sections of the autobiography, Twain makes cruel observations about his supposed friends, acquaintances and one of his landladies.