Box 82....

[poltr1]

This past week, I finally delved into one of the boxes of old computer printouts I had from college -- the box I numbered "box 82" (for 2nd box created in 1988). This box of printouts contained old email and Usenet articles -- misc.jobs.offered, rec.arts.comics, rec.games.frp, alt.cyberpunk, and others.

Well, instead of doing what most people would do -- pick up the box and pitch it -- I emptied it out, a little at a time. I just can't bring myself to toss it out without going through it and looking for nuggets. There were some interesting articles and a few surprises (including a post from figmo in rec.food.cooking about cookie hardness and baking soda vs. baking powder).

As I was reading some of the mail mesages, I got a warm feeling remembering the people I used to correspond with in college. I haven't heard from many of them since I graduated; I wonder what they're doing now. Some of them were guys I wanted to pledge my college fraternity; some of them were young women that I tried to date and wasn't very successful with them. But I had a level of camaraderie and friendship with most of them. There's a small core of folks I've remained in contact with these past 14+ years, which includes gleepy.

(N.B. If you went to SUNY/Buffalo and remember the "Beachboard" BBS, I used to be known as "Cerebus" on the system.)

I certainly don't need to keep the paper. For the email items I want to keep, I'll scam them in as images and save them as PDF files. I'd like to OCR them but some items were printed on 14 7/8" x 11" green-bar computer paper with a dot-matrix line printer, and others were printed with a regular high-speed line printer. As for the Usenet posts, I'm reasonably sure they can be found at the Usenet Archive at http://groups.google.com.

So far, I'm nearly halfway through the box. I hope to finish going through the stuff by the end of next week. Then I'll have a pile of the nuggets, which will then be scanned in (if email), or added to an indexing spreadsheet that will contain a link to the article on Google groups (if Usenet).

I must have accumulated about 20 such boxes during my time in college. I feel sad that I've wasted so much paper printing out these things. I should have saved them onto floppy disks instead, but I was too cheap to buy them at the time, and didn't really have access to a PC through which I could have downloaded them.

Comments

[doeadear.livejournal.com]

Yes, whenever I find a box of stuff, I need to look through all its contents. Cool that you've stayed in touch with gleepy for so long. I am still in touch with my friends I worked with 14 years ago, but not really with any school friends.

[(Anonymous)]

Good luck with your archiving! I think scanning old e-mails etc. is a great idea; I have piles of print-outs too, but they're on the wide kind of paper that won't easy fit on my small (i.e. cheap) scanner. -- Debbie