So the COVID-19 house task of the week has been going through a stash of 20+-year-old CD-ROMs that I have kept for way too long. These files were supposed to ease the setting everything else back up. You know, because "you never know".
Remember when writable CD-ROMs were the in thing? If you do, you're old like me.
When I made these, the stuff I saved was really important. Looking through a dozen CD-ROMs of these I found a total of forty files worth keeping.
Forty.
And they were family pictures, scanned at what I thought was great resolution at the time. Granted - I had an 18" tube monitor that was deeper than the picture was wide. The computer at the time, an HP with a four gig hard drive running Windows98. I never imagined then that I was going to be dealing in terabytes of CdV's, Cabinet Cards, Brownie card, created art, etc., and so on. That computer back then was almost as much computing power as we used at the trade association I worked for!
The problem that those family pictures are mostly *.gif files, AND each one is about the 300 pixels wide. Pretty useless. But they have since rescanned at 200% their size, 600dpi, and stored in multiple clouds.
The jewels in all of these were some images I scanned in 2000 that belonged to my cousin Di who passed away in 2019. (I just found out about her death on Monday morning.)
Things changed in 2004 when I signed my first respectable book contract, but the way I backed stuff up also changed instead of using CD-ROMs, I started using portable drives, so they are my next target. I have about 20k regional history images for north central Ohio.
The downside to this is that CD-ROMs are starting to fail after 20 years. So they would lock up my computer when I run them. The upside is that computers reboot in the blink of an eye.
What I didn't find was anything of monetary value, which would have been great.
I'll be content with the 4" of cleared CD-ROMs on the shelf.
And happily, there are no 5.5 floppies that I have to contend with.
Huzzah.
I can remember when entire operating systems were run from floppy discs! How times change in just a few decades... Jx
ReplyDeleteI remember those huge floppies. and windows 3.1 and windows 95.
ReplyDeleteI have ten shoe boxes full of floppy disks - photos, writing, and tons of songs I wrote in midi and sheet music form. Sigh. I bought one of those transfer units, but it will not read the files. Don't know what to do. Glad you are having success.
ReplyDeleteI have a masters and and a undergraduate degree…How things do change...I remember going for my undgrad and we had a computer class...Like a introductory class...We were taught different types of storage, memory, those disks you would pop in to save stuff, what a computer does, how it works...My college had a computer lab in the library where one would go and type their term papers...The lab had PCs and MACs...I would always pray that a PC was available...I tried a MAC once and it was so far out there...I got tired of going to the collage to write papers and dealing with the 2 hour limit...I had a friend who worked for Microsoft...He did programing and was the help desk type person you would call if one had an issue with their products...I told him I needed to bite the bullet and buy a PC...He asked a few questions and off to Best Buy we went...I just pushed the cart...He set the thing up and brought over all his disks and I had all the Microsoft products I could handle...I graduated from my undgrad studies in 1993...Yes times have changed...Now I rarely save things on my laptop...I use a thumb drive...And I have moved from the big PC set-up to a simple laptop...Remember when we would go to computer cafes...I never liked them but I remember using one here and there in a pinch...
ReplyDeleteOne of the greatest academic and archival tragedies, now and especially to come, is the backing up and then destruction of records or information to microfilm or various computer backup schemes, all of which will become impossible to read in the near future.
ReplyDeleteI have boxes of backup tapes made on a SCSI drive, and even if these tapes could be read, today's machines can no longer run the software to restore and decrypt the files--in other words, all those years of work are completely lost.
--Jim
Someone, somewhere must have a vintage PC onto which the appropriate software may be stored? I'd try a local library or college... Jx
DeleteOh I agree. I have a Public History MA and it's a huge worry among historians. Very few people have physical photographs anymore, it's all on their phone or computer. And no one writes letters!! Do you have any idea how much historical information has been gleaned from letters from regular people? Blogs come and go, servers get shut down, text chains are unless, computers crash. It will be a tragedy for future researchers and a massive loss of information. Time marches on, but not always in a good way.
ReplyDeleteSome of my most treasured possessions are love letters between my parents (dated since Jr High), letters from my Grandfather during the war and many many family photographs.
That would be text chains are USELESS.
DeleteImagine Archive.org's Wayback Machine trying to catalogue emails or text conversations? A nightmare. But at least it does exist, and does catalogue blogs and personal websites... Jx
DeleteBut every current technology is always on the verge of being the next Beta-Max!LOL Look at our comments, tech from just a decade ago is almost worthless for storage and retrieval.
DeleteThe problem is many smaller historical societies or museums won't be able to afford the means to transcribe older tech. Or regular folks will just "Lose" it because their computer is old, or more likely their parents computer is old. It will just get tossed or recycled for scrap. Physical photographs, physical letters, these could be accessed by virtually anyone. I fear that won't be the case in the future.
Like I said, it's my poor old historian mindset. I LOVE the internet and the world at my fingertips, I don't love so much the disposability many of us wallow in.
KellyRed, nailed it. All these people screaming "Digital" have me worried. What do you do when you find these old files tucked away and you can't get to them. This is the generation that photography is going to fail.
Delete