clik! box
Ever since I got dynamips, the cisco router emulator to actually run code compiled by GCC, I wanted to do something more fun than a simple game of planetfall with a memory mapped file.  And to make a router more like a real computer, I’d want some kind of disk.  Now most cisco routers have PCMCIA slots, so remembering back in the day iomega sold the click! drive, a 40MB removable disk cartridge that has a PCMCIA interface!  Neat!
And even better, on eBay I managed to fine one. Â And much to my surprise when it arrived it was NIB, from 1999!
Contents of the box
As you can see, there isn’t much inside that box, a CD-ROM of the manual, a brief leaflet, and of course the drive itself and a single 40MB clik! cartridge. Â I have to say that it’s all pretty neat.
The clik! disk, compared to a two dollar coin
The disk itself is pretty small. Â It does remind me of the older minicomputer disk packs with a removable sleeve to protect the media, but like a three and half inch floppy it is spring loaded to keep users away from it.
Inserting the clik! disk into the drive.
The disk gently slides into the drive, to give a very satisfying ‘click’ sound to it.
Unfortunately for me, since this was one of those late night impulse purchases I should have remembered that the cisco 1701 series of routers does NOT have a PCMCIA slot, and the NPE-G1 on my cisco 7200 VXR, instead has a compact flash adapter, not the full PCMCIA.
OOPS.
While I do have a RSP 4+ with the PCMCIA slots, I don’t have a chassis or power supply so I can’t do anything with it anyways. Â Unless I find the pinouts, and make my own harness to power it up, which I guess is always possible.
So close, but it went nowhere. Â But I thought it was interesting enough to take a look at such a tiny storage solution from the turn of the 21st century.
