Friday, January 9, 2009

Piles of bits...

I don't have time to do the blog entry I was planning for today (if you're curious and want to get a head start, look up up bootstrapping).

In my spare time (probably 10 minutes a day...), I've been archiving my old floppies. That isn't anywhere near a complete list (I probably have over a thousand floating around), I was interrupted by a lawsuit (not aimed at me, but that didn't matter). But I'm back to work at it now.

It amazes me, however, at all the stuff I've collected over the years. Who remembers the CDC Plato system? I found some source code for lessons. I have my virus zoo. Old games. Early programming attempts. Drivers for long gone and forgotten (by everyone, including their manufacturers) hardware. Commerical software where I wish I had kept the manual instead of the disk. And so much stuff that makes me wonder "Why the hell did I ever have that in the first place, and why have I kept it all these years?"

Ahhh... nostalgia.

1 comment:

DMcCunney said...

I just discovered your archiving project by accident (it was referenced on a wiki I help maintain) and was tickled. I have many floppy disks, in 5.25 and 3.5 formats, with an amazing accumulation of stuff. (Packrat? Me? Er...)

But just for the record, you probably don't need the ancient archive tools you reference to read the ancient archives. Modern multi-format archivers should handle them. I use an open source product called 7zip for most things, and it handles zip, arj, and rar files among other things, as well as an assortment on Unix formats and it's own 7z format. It's for Windows, but the underlying engine has been ported to Linux and MS-DOS (with a DOS extender).

Your profile notes home is Philadelphia. Whereabouts in Phila? (I grew up there.) And count me as another SF fan, though what is hard and soft SF is a subject of much debate among SF fans.
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Dennis