Sooo true-
except my strata go down to boxes of old 3 1/2" and 5 1/4" floppies labled “.bat files” and “misc .txts”.
I’ve got an old 8 inch floppy disk around here somewhere. I’d dearly love to see what’s on it, as it’s from my early career, back when I was incredibly brilliant. :rolleyes:
Yes. Scarily true. Down to the names of the files.
When I left my first job, back in the mid-80’s, they were nice enough to let me take a backup copy of my emails on a reel of tape. I think I took later advantage of a tape reader to transfer the emails to a floppy or zip drive. So yes, I may have a strata of email and posts that go all the way back to the early days of Usenet.
This is all part of my “infinite closets” theory of hard drive capacity. If you had enough closets in your house, you’d probably never throw anything away. And hard drive capacities have been increasing to the point where, by the time you buy a new machine or hard drive, all your previous existing files can fit into a tiny corner of the new one.
Oh, how many times have I said "Wow, I'll never fill this one up!"Some months ago, a good friend and former house mate asked me to pick up some stuff of mine that had been still lying around on his (our former shared) attic. It included my dear old Commodore C64, complete with datasette and a box of about ten data tapes (mostly games, but I did some programming back then, and I’d love to run my first self-written programs and read their clumsy code from when I was 16). Not surprisingly, the datasette and/or the tapes were too corrupted to be readable (though the computer still worked like a charm). But I still have them, and I bet a data recovery specialist could probably restore some of that data (NO, I don’t have that in mind).
Add to that the obligatory 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" floppies (I could do a Win 3.1 or MS-Dos 6.2 install from floppies), numerous CD-ROMs (remember when they were called like that?), DVDs and disk drives, and you get the picture. Yes, I’m a data hoarder.
I was looking through some file cabinets in the basement the other day and found a draw of 3 1/2" floppies. They included X-Wing (50MB! That was a huge program!), Commander Keen, Duke Nukem and several other random ones. Maybe I should get a drive for them . . .
Aside:
Your New Jersey is showing. The word is spelled (and pronounced, everywhere outside of Jersey) as “drawer”.
Waaay back when I bought an XT clone. (10Mhz, 20Meg HD, 640k memory, etc.) MS-DOS 3.3. Anyway, as I upgraded over the years, I never wiped the disk.
I.e., get a new hard drive? Just copy the old one to the new one. All OS upgrades in place.
So there is some 20+ year old cruft around.
But older than that are a couple of mag tapes. I have a 9-track tape that has stuff going back to the late 70s that I was smart enough to copy to an 8mm tape at some point. I copied the stuff off that but lost the copy. But no now easy way to get stuff off either.
Even worse, I have an 8-track tape (not the musical kind!) which was an odd format. It goes back to the mid-70s.
At least I haven’t had any punch card decks in a long while.
Due to a recent move, I shitcanned all my obsolete floppies. I did keep the 3.5’ floppies of AOL 2.0, 2.5, and 3.0, though. 2.0 and 3.0 are still sealed in the cellophane wrapper. I figure they’re nice curiosities.
OMG, Angband!