Copyright © 2005 by Ethan A. Winning. All Rights Reserved.
It's spring. It's time to clean out my desk again. And today is "general pickup" garbage day when you can throw out the kitchen stove and not be charged extra. An article from C|NET about obsolete storage came. And so it began.
It started with two cases of 3¼" floppies which, even though it takes a can opener to get them dismantled, have retained the name "floppy." They don't flop. They certainly don't store. I think they hold 1.1 megs of material, and I noted that most of the pictures I take are 1.5 megs so not even one would fit on the disk. The problem is that I no longer have a computer that has a 3¼" floppy drive. I can't just throw these things out. They might have financial data. Ohmygod! This will take hours. I put the estimated 1,100 floppies back in their cases and back in the storage cabinet.
Then I sat, and looked around the office remembering other media that I can no longer use, can't seem to get rid of, and sorely wish I have a dollar for every dollar I paid (why is everyone so willing to settle for a nickel?). Some of these will predate you, but you'll have to believe that they existed.
There's a box of 8½" floppies that went with an NBI stand-alone word processor from 1986ish. Half have data; half have the operating system. This huge word processor did nothing more than word processing and, with the world's loudest daisy wheel printer, cost over $17,000. Worth every penny. The NBI - both processor and company - are long gone, but there are at least 40 of these large red floppies. I could cut them up with a scissors, but that would mean that I have to tackle what came next, the 5¼ inch floppy.
The first computer had a single 5¼" drive, the next had two. Now I have none, but I have plenty of disks. I have backup tapes, called "data cartridges." Used to take overnight to back up a 6 gig hard drive! Can't find the drive.
I have Zip disks and drives,100 and 250 megs. It's the one case where I might have more drives than disks. Don't ask.
And now I'm using jump drives. But this isn't about computers, per se. It's about my media life since I was a kid, and my fear about how much more time and money I'll waste before I'm beyond caring.
When I was a kid, music came on 78 rpm records, then 33s, and then 45s. My wife is the one with the 45 collection, two songs per record. Can't get rid of them: I'm sure Elvis hasn't left this building yet.
Somewhere in the garage is an 8-track player and at least 10 tapes. Got the four of us through a three week trip to Banff and Jasper once, though we were so sick of the music that we traded all of our collection with a couple of guys traveling from the East coast who we ran into at Mt. Rundle. Oh joy! We got Neil Diamond for Anne Murray and Debbie Boone. But they threw in a copy of "Peter, Paul and Mommy," though I just can't bear "Puff the Magic Dragon" who, some of you may know, was the Captain and Tennille's brother and brother-in-law. I'm sure someone at this Rundle Swap Meet ended up in therapy for years...
We must have 150 cassette tapes, all lovingly put together by me from our albums. Can't get rid of those, but since you can just touch a button and get to a song, I never listen to them. At least 25 of them are in the armrest of my car...along with a dozen or so CDs. Some of the CDs are store bought; most are now of my own selection. This is not good. They have one label per disk and they're scribbled with a Sharpie.
Since 1960 when I took my first color photo, I have collected - no...amassed...more than 10,000 slides, that just before I got smart and moved to prints only. Now I have no way to save them except to scan them one to four at a time. If I live to be 125, I should be half-done. One thing for certain, I'll never be well-done. They've been sitting in slide trays (to the delight of visitors, I haven't had a projector for 15 years) and shoe boxes waiting to be sorted. The kids will probably want to see what they looked like, so there's some motivation to get going on Project 147.2bK. But then I made a mistake.
I've bought a digital camera almost four years ago. Do you know how many slide shows and "collections" of prize photos you can put on a CD? Have you come to the realization that the maximum number of times you will watch these slide shows is three? But this is your life and you have to store the CDs or at least the pictures. And, then, after 1,000 hours of sorting, adding music, and putting together these collections you realize that there's a conspiracy out there: in less than 10 years, the CD will have gone the way of the LP and you will have to find another storage medium and start the process all over again. No?
Yes! Think of all those Betamax (I didn't fall for that one) and VHS tapes that you've replaced with DVD's? I once had a VHS recorder without a remote! I had HBO when it was just HB and I taped every movie that I might want to see, but never wanted to see. I once saw an entire vacation through the viewfinder of a 10-pound VHS camera! I have spent as many hours taping as I have labeling the tapes. I have a desktop and a handheld labeling machine. When I run out of tape, I will never label another thing....'cept broccoli so I don't confuse it with something that should have been thrown out.
Was life really supposed to be comprised of pixilated souvenirs, neatly labeled and encased, stored and unseen until your heirs get together to say, "Who's that?" or "Why does he have five copies of Blazing Saddles?" (Well, that should be obvious. What if four were lost?)
How do we justify wasting half our lives chronicling the other half?
We call it a hobby! But note that we say we "work at our hobbies."
"Ah, at least he died happy. He was just settin' there working at his hobby. I understand he was up to 1971 in his slides, '82 in his tapes, and '03 for his DVD's. Never did get around to the CD's. Too bad. The kids really wanted a record of somethin' past their second birthdays. Should have put them on a hard drive. They's only the size of a quarter nowadays. Or he coulda had one of them belly button implants which acts as a projector, holds 20,000 songs, 200,000 projectable photos, 11,000 DVD's (8,000 if they're are too many Tarrantino's), has his medical records, spits out stem-cells like a Pez dispenser, and can cross-reference all data since birth so you can recall every personal best no matter how small the increment. And next year, they're adding a spell checker."
"Yeah, but where's the fun in that? Ah, give me those go old days of the floppy disk. I think I saw some in his top desk drawer."