Let it go
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Comments posted to this topic are about the item Let it go
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Maybe you shouldn't have thrown away the floppies. I sold my old Access 1.0 floppies (including box, manual, and 1.1 upgrade) for 50 USD at a garage sale a few years ago. There's a pretty good market for vintage software.
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I suppose a relocation is the best motivation for slimming down our holdings, but it is by no means a complete solution. The longest I resided in one home was 28 years. Moving out of there involved multiple trips to the Goodwill collection place and even to the county dump site. I even had binders of 11 x 14 7/8 printouts of COBOL programs from IBM 360/50 days. I did give up my Apple II+ and the 5.25 inch disk drive years ago, but still have several boxes of 3.5 inch floppies stored away, so I'm keeping an old tower desktop that has a drive that will read them so that someday I can go through those.
Back before the resurgence of LP records, I donated my collection of over 400 to a charity without ever getting them digitized. I have managed to convert our collection of 550 CD's to digital and have a system with Bose speakers in our home office dedicated to that. But the CD's are still stored in eight boxes and taking storage space. (Tip: Starbucks K-cup boxes are quite sturdy and nicely hold 50 cd's in cases)
This winter my computer project has been starting to scan and digitize four generations of old b+w family photos from about 25 albums that have been stored in boxes for decades. Then I have our combined-family 35mm slide history that is also stored away in a hallway closet. There are thousands of those in slide file boxes and projector reels. I did just this month spend $1k for a slide scanner which purportedly will automate the scanning of 50 at a time in an overnight process. Our office contains another old repurposed computer with a 27" display dedicated to the photo collection. I'm on the way to becoming a Photoshop expert. Unfortunately I've not been successful in recruiting family members to help with all of this.
Thank goodness for NAS storage devices.
But the question now becomes after I get all of it digitized, what do I do with the originals? The current plan is to pass all the originals on to our kids and let them store them away for THEIR kids.
Oh, I should also mention the boxes of VCR tapes of our favorite movies. Still have two players for those in the basement.
Let it go? Yeah, sure...
Rick
Disaster Recovery = Backup ( Backup ( Your Backup ) ) -
Very good point, Kathi. We've been in my home for almost 30 years. We've accumulated a lot. Purging it of the extra stuff isn't easy. I've got some PC and older software related books, which I've begun going through to get rid of. Unfortunately, my wife is a pack rat. I won't describe things, but you get the idea. One thing that doesn't help is her siblings will send her things like boxes of old photos of people no one knows who they are, or really old rocking chairs that need repair. My wife has a hard time getting rid of any of this stuff. I resent my brother and sister in-laws dumping this stuff onto us.
Anyway, good admonition to get rid of what you don't need.
Kindest Regards, Rod Connect with me on LinkedIn.
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My heart fell when you said that you threw the old floppies. They are a part of a younger you that got you started down this road. Secondly, there are people online who would have loved to have them. I collect old Macintoshes. While most of the popular software is already available online, not all of it is and it is nice to hold the original media in your hands. Now, with floppy disks, it can well be that they aren't readable anymore.
I try to follow a somewhat different philosophy: have what you want and want what you have. We should be careful though about using the word «need». Many use it as interchangeable with «want». When it comes to things, most of our needs are satisfied, while many of our wants are not. You don't need the photo albums of your youth but they are precious to you. You do want them though.
This is the where the whole concept of spring-cleaning comes in. It is essentially an audit of what you have and what you don't need. I work on a rough rule of 10 years. If I haven't used it (looked through it, played with etc.) within the last 10 years, then it goes on the pile to be brought to the charity shop.
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I've have run only one garage sale in my life and am pretty sure Goodwill would have just tossed the floppies. I didn't have the box or manual. I'm keeping family photos, but I didn't realize I even had the floppies until I found them. That's the problem with all the stuff that's been forgotten about. It suddenly has value when you see it.
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sean redmond wrote:My heart fell when you said that you threw the old floppies. They are a part of a younger you that got you started down this road. Secondly, there are people online who would have loved to have them.
Sean, if I still had the Apple system I would be happy to pass them on to you or any collectors. It's the same with my original collection of 450+ 12" LP records that I donated to Good Will Store years ago. And now I have about 500 CDs stored away in eight boxes while my collection of 70,000 tracks sits on a tiny 11" notebook that controls my Bose sound system. I do still periodically purchase a few CD's, mostly republished older collections, but those immediately get loaded onto my music system and added to the storage. Unlike the quality of computers which keep getting better, the quality of new music sucks, in my opinion. I'm thinking that it would be really bad if I had to keep my 70,000 tracks on floppies!
I don't recall all of the details, but it seems that back in my Apple 2+ days there was not really a good migration path from there for my needs, so I decided to go with Microsoft, and never really looked back, with the exception of my iPhone 4 which I just migrated from last month. (I hate cell phones!)
This picture is the first storage unit I'm building in an unfinished portion of our basement where we moved two years ago. It's 4' deep by 18' long and will hold maybe 1/3 of the stuff we have still sitting in boxes in the finished portion where the movers set it for us.
Rick
Disaster Recovery = Backup ( Backup ( Your Backup ) ) - skeleton567 wrote:
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This winter my computer project has been starting to scan and digitize four generations of old b+w family photos from about 25 albums that have been stored in boxes for decades. Then I have our combined-family 35mm slide history that is also stored away in a hallway closet. There are thousands of those in slide file boxes and projector reels. I did just this month spend $1k for a slide scanner which purportedly will automate the scanning of 50 at a time in an overnight process. Our office contains another old repurposed computer with a 27" display dedicated to the photo collection. I'm on the way to becoming a Photoshop expert. Unfortunately I've not been successful in recruiting family members to help with all of this.
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I've been working on a similar project over the past year - except I've only got 3 generations of photos and they're not in albums, they're in boxes. All the photos from my grandparents that I scanned were put on a flash drive for each of my aunts and uncles as part of a Christmas gift. Coincidently, I was also working on a printed photo album with pictures from the last 10 years of family Christmas parties. That was also included as part of the gift for my aunts and uncles. It turned out to be a good year for both projects since most of us weren't able to get together.
Like you I still have the originals. The only thing I've done with them is make sure the 35mm slides and negatives are put into archival storage sleeves.
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I like the old floppies, and if you have some that you'd like to get rid of, send them to me.
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I remember cutting notches on the other side of the floppy disk to double the storage capacity. 🙂
I also remember the pang of guilt I felt when throwing out the leather-bound booklet and diskette for my Apple II version of dbMan, the first database platform I ever knowingly used, That project lead to my first database of all the tracks of my vast collection of 250+ cassette tapes.
I'm a sentimental guy. I tear up when I see a grandfather teaching a 5-year old how to fish. But, as beautiful and sentimental as that dbMan diskette was, I wouldn't have touched it in the last *40* years. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I made the right decision.
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