Saturday 08/27/2022
I had a tech squad request to help Dave T install a new iMac. I thought this was going to be easy. Since I had to leave soon after 11am I wanted to get this out of the way, so we met in his place at 8:30. I unpacked the lovely new iMac and set it up and started the process where a new Mac sucks up all the data from your backup drive. Except that this stopped after about ten minutes with the message, not enough room.
Turns out, Dave T’s old iMac has a 1TB drive that is half full, 480GB of mostly pictures, about a 100GB of music. The new iMac that he ordered from the online Apple store? He had gotten the default 250GB SSD. Ooops. He was shocked. He is somewhat mobility limited so I said I would go an enquire at the Apple store. I took down and re-packed the new iMac, and set up and booted up the old one.
Then I walked over to the Apple store and found out the good news. There’s a 14-day return policy. They’ll take it back and credit his card for the purchase price. Then he can order another one with a proper sized disk. I went back and gave him the word. We’ll work out transporting the box to the store on Monday.
Then off to the museum to lead a tour. I had about a 18 at the start, dwindling to 10 at the end. There was nobody signed up for the 2pm tour and I briefly considered being a hero and doing a second tour, but I really didn’t feel like it.
While waiting patiently for Dave T’s new iMac to scan the backup drive I flashed back to an experience in what had to be, 1972 or even earlier. I was still doing software support out of the SF branch office. I had to help a customer in Monterey, CA do some major software install on a 360 with a 2315 disk array. A few days before I had fallen off my bike and dislocated my shoulder so my arm was in a sling and kind of painful. I can remember being very bored and impatient waiting and waiting while the computer initialized a disk pack and copied a lot of data from tape.
So today I was sitting in front of a computer waiting for it to copy a lot of data to initialize a disk and I realized: I’ve been waiting for computers to finish copying files for fifty fucking years!
Codgerville 