Bones and Joints Get Older; Media Gets Unreadable

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Bones and Joints Get Older; Media Gets Unreadable

3/9/2005

By Terry Calhoun

Back in about 1985, I was busy staying at home with my kids and working free-lance–writing, typesetting, designing books, etc. I recall laying out more than $3,000 for a Radio Shack daisy-wheel printer that would be able to print out some of the nicely laid-out things I produced for customers. I spent days learning how to use WordStar to get that printer to create bullets–I finally succeeded with a superscripted, bolded, period and, of course, every time I used it a lot, I broke another daisy wheel.

That printer was driven by a couple of early PCs which used 5 1/4-inch floppy drives. I began naming each new floppy that I used after planets, and then moons of planets. Eventually, I ran out of moons of the planets circling Sol and began using fictitious planets from the many science fiction novels and short stories I had read. By the time I got up to nearly 1,000 floppies I gave up and created a numbering system. I still have those floppies, but they’re (almost?) worse than useless. See, I still can’t make my mind up, and that’s what this column is about. Should I just throw them all out?

We’re remodeling our old (core was built in 1870) farm house and in moving things around for the son-in-law-to-be, who is doing the work for us, last week I came across a couple of large plastic storage boxes with all of those 5 1/4-inch floppies in them. I almost tossed them out. Not only has it been years since I have seen a drive on which I could read them, most of them were created in old, outdated software that ran on DOS, which I no longer have copies of anyway.

Then, I ran across another box where I have been storing all my 3.5-inch floppies and Zip discs. That box, of course, is the box that has old stuff in it that I have been planning – in my spare time – to move over onto one of my current computers’ hard drives. After a great deal of soul searching, I decided not to throw the first two boxes out, and added the third box to the collection. But, collection of what?

My wife says it’s a collection of junk. I am beginning to agree. Surely I will never, ever try to read the contents of those 5 1/4-inch discs, if only because there’s nothing on them I can usefully read with my current software configuration, even if I had the hardware. It was kind of cool thinking about moons and planets in light of the recent Titan landing and photos and the continuing discoveries of new planets around other stars, but that d'esn’t help me read those discs.

And, what about the 3.5-inch discs? Or the Zip discs? Probably everything on them is still readable, if I had the hardware. And I do have a little insertable floppy drive for my Dell Inspiron 8500 . . . somewhere. And they do contain some of the very earliest digital photographs that I took – several years’ worth, in fact. But . . . I am caught up in the same conundrum that I hassle the IT folks at my job about. I so often hear from some other staff: “There’s so much junk on the central server, why can’t people (meaning, mostly, Terry.) spend some time deleting all that stuff?”

I tell them, and have been telling them for years, that my time, which would have to be spent opening and looking at each file in order to make an intelligent decision, is too valuable to spend in that way. “Storage space is cheap, so just add some more disc space and leave my stuff alone!”