I Pity Inanimate Objects

Clearing out the office closet so Amy can share it with me so we can make her office into the baby’s room. On a cleaning binge, throwing out tons of old software boxes. Just found:

– Adobe Photoshop 2.5.1
– ColdFusion Application Server 3.1
– Kai’s Power Tools 3
– No less than five separate Win95 installers, some of them legal

and so on and so on…

Another tough one : revisiting the floppy disk boxes : around 300 floppies – BeOS R3 boot disks, antique Linux and FreeBSD boot disks, WinCIM and CompuServe and Prodigy and ZD Interchange installers, DirectoryFreedom (my old favorite DOS directory navigator), XyWrite installer (my favorite DOS text editor), tons of games, Photoshop on floppy, zillions of drivers for sound, video, and network cards I no longer have, setup disks for long-defunct ISPs, all those new hard drive setup disks you never use, ancient terminal communication apps, paint and morph programs sent to me at Ziff, which no one ever heard of and never got off the ground, games like Heretic and Descent, BIOS updaters, old embarassing writings, about 14 MS Intellipoint driver disks (none ever installed, as far as I can remember), CD-ROM ATAPI drivers, SCSI scanner drivers, and on down the road. I kept about 20 — the rest, into the crapper. Too much trouble to get rid of them. I haven’t touched a floppy in a couple of years now, except to booting or rescue drivers on the odd x86 box. But I’ve eliminated almost all the x86 from my life, and convinced everyone I support (family members, landord, and now the law firm) to go Mac. This stuff is groovy history, but it’s gathering dust. Sentimentality and attachments bog me down. Things that once seemed important no longer do.

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