Today's boxes of old goodies.......
Mar. 26th, 2004 01:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poltr1Earlier this week, I had to go to the data warehouse (my offsite storage unit) to look for and find my copy of Roxio Easy CD Creator 5. Well, I did, but I had to remove nearly everything in the storage unit, and put it back. I also found my old NCR 3180 laptop, a box of old computer and office supply catalogs, and a box of old InfoWorld newspapers/magazines from 1999 and 2000.
Wednesday, I tried to run some diagnostics on the laptop. It still works, but there are a few bad spots on the hard drive. (Lesson learned: Don't put computer equipment in cold storage if I expect to use it again.) I'll give it to my daughter to play with and bang on the keys. Or use it to reformat and wipe old floppy disks. I really doubt it's worth much to anyone these days -- I bought it second-hand in the summer of '97, so it's at least 7 years old. The details: It's a 486SL/33, souped up with 32 Mb of memory, a 2 Gb hard drive, and a docking station with a 4x CD-ROM. (The AT&T Globalyst 250 and NEC Versa are slight variants.) The battery no longer holds a charge.
Yesterday, I went through the box of catalogs. I found hardware, software, and shareware catalogs dating back to 1990 -- the year I bought my first computer. Why was I saving these? Nostalgia? I have more than enough souvenirs of my life. The items in the catalogs are obsolete and no longer available. So I pitched all but the latest ones for each company (as I should).
I remember the early days of shareware, or at least the days when I first started computing. Before the Web, vendors would sell floppy disks containing shareware programs for anywhere between $2 and $5 a disk. You were able to try it before you bought it. If you liked the software, you'd pay more money to the author, and get either the full version of the software, a printed manual, and support. Some vendors, like Public Brand Software, had catalogs (and probably warehouses) of disks, both 5 1/2" and 3 1/4". [Update: Public Brand Software was bought by Ziff-Davis in 1991; its files now can be obtained from their www.hotfiles.com website.] Shareware was also available for download on many BBSes -- computers set up to accept incoming calls and act as bulletin board systems.
Then came CD-ROMs, and vendors loaded the CDs with lots of shareware programs. One of my favorite series of shareware CDs was Night Owl. They'd put out a new disk every few months. I built up a nice little collection of disks. (I don't have a complete set, unfortunately. I'm missing the first several disks, and I don't remember what their last disk was.)
And then came the World-Wide Web. This radically changed the distribution of shareware, and reduced the distribution costs to 0. The only cost was for hosting the programs on a web server.
I'm glad the idea of shareware is still around. It's a win-win. People get to try before they buy, and independent programmers have a small second income. (That is, if people register and pay for the software.)
This morning, I went through several issues of InfoWorld, skimming each issue, looking for interesting information and articles worthy of saving and reading later. Most if it was old news, old technology, and old ads. I didn't have the time to read it then. There were a few career-oriented articels, which I saved. And since the regular columnists have their past columns on the InfoWorld web site, I don't need to hang on to the paper versions. The only thing I'll need to store is a pointer to articles, and not the articles themselves.
4 boxes down, many more to go.....
Wednesday, I tried to run some diagnostics on the laptop. It still works, but there are a few bad spots on the hard drive. (Lesson learned: Don't put computer equipment in cold storage if I expect to use it again.) I'll give it to my daughter to play with and bang on the keys. Or use it to reformat and wipe old floppy disks. I really doubt it's worth much to anyone these days -- I bought it second-hand in the summer of '97, so it's at least 7 years old. The details: It's a 486SL/33, souped up with 32 Mb of memory, a 2 Gb hard drive, and a docking station with a 4x CD-ROM. (The AT&T Globalyst 250 and NEC Versa are slight variants.) The battery no longer holds a charge.
Yesterday, I went through the box of catalogs. I found hardware, software, and shareware catalogs dating back to 1990 -- the year I bought my first computer. Why was I saving these? Nostalgia? I have more than enough souvenirs of my life. The items in the catalogs are obsolete and no longer available. So I pitched all but the latest ones for each company (as I should).
I remember the early days of shareware, or at least the days when I first started computing. Before the Web, vendors would sell floppy disks containing shareware programs for anywhere between $2 and $5 a disk. You were able to try it before you bought it. If you liked the software, you'd pay more money to the author, and get either the full version of the software, a printed manual, and support. Some vendors, like Public Brand Software, had catalogs (and probably warehouses) of disks, both 5 1/2" and 3 1/4". [Update: Public Brand Software was bought by Ziff-Davis in 1991; its files now can be obtained from their www.hotfiles.com website.] Shareware was also available for download on many BBSes -- computers set up to accept incoming calls and act as bulletin board systems.
Then came CD-ROMs, and vendors loaded the CDs with lots of shareware programs. One of my favorite series of shareware CDs was Night Owl. They'd put out a new disk every few months. I built up a nice little collection of disks. (I don't have a complete set, unfortunately. I'm missing the first several disks, and I don't remember what their last disk was.)
And then came the World-Wide Web. This radically changed the distribution of shareware, and reduced the distribution costs to 0. The only cost was for hosting the programs on a web server.
I'm glad the idea of shareware is still around. It's a win-win. People get to try before they buy, and independent programmers have a small second income. (That is, if people register and pay for the software.)
This morning, I went through several issues of InfoWorld, skimming each issue, looking for interesting information and articles worthy of saving and reading later. Most if it was old news, old technology, and old ads. I didn't have the time to read it then. There were a few career-oriented articels, which I saved. And since the regular columnists have their past columns on the InfoWorld web site, I don't need to hang on to the paper versions. The only thing I'll need to store is a pointer to articles, and not the articles themselves.
4 boxes down, many more to go.....
