I spent a few hours today poking around in my backups and archives. Almost my entire computing history is still around. Like my physical belongings, I have a hard time throwing stuff out. Fortunately, disk storage keeps getting denser, so I can keep the previous years' data around in a teeny corner of whatever current store I have installed. The only things I don't have readily available are the things encoded in weird formats or on odd media. See, these days computers don't really come with 5.25" drives, so all my stuff from the eighties is pretty inaccessible. That is, until about '85, when I started keeping stuff on 3.5" disks and my productive output increased tenfold or more. Unfortunately, those files are on Amiga formatted disks, which are some kinda weird variable speed drive format which a typical IBM drive has no chance of reading (Mac drives can, I think). That's alright, I guess. Those are mostly embarassingly rudimentary graphics and animation and REALLY embarassing tunes. A few logs of BBS sessions, maybe a few demos, some amigabasic games I wrote, and a very small amount of low resolution 64 color softcore porn (4096 color if it was in HAM mode). (HAM is still the funniest graphics mode). (more HAM than you can shake a devil at!) Mostly what I want to keep logs of is email. Back in the day, you could download bulletin board messages for offline reading using something called... uh... blue...er... Blue something. Was it Q-blue? Well anyway, I think I used that once or twice, and so I have a few BBS messages archived. Probably about Jay Miner or democontests or something like that.

I guess I'll burn all that stuff onto a DVD-R or something else huge and permanent. 6 Gigs is enough to hold everything up to last year, at which point I started making 24 bit 48 KHz sound files which are really, really big. I have 20 something gigs of those. Gonna have to think of a different way to archive that stuff. Or I know! Maybe I'll finally throw something away! It will go with my housecleaning efforts, which are resulting in me throwing away stuff as old as high school. Great!

1997

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