Closet technology

For the past couple of months I have been going through more than a decade of backups, trying to organize terabytes of photographs, hundreds of essays and rants and dozens of software projects that have accumulated in my apartment since the dawn of the computer era. In the back of my closet I discovered a box with 78 floppy disks, some of which included the installation/system disks for MS DOS 3.0, Microsoft Windows 3.11 and an unidentifiable version of Novel.

I also found a box full of zip disks and even managed to dig out a zip drive so I could copy whatever useful data those disks contained. And even though most of the stuff on them was completely useless and the disks themselves quickly ended up in my garbage bin, I made a point of dragging my wife into the office, pointing at the dust-covered zip drive and triumphantly telling her that she can no longer yell at me for not throwing anything even remotely technology-related because it might be useful at some point in our lives. Wow, that was a really long sentence, and by the way, in order to get the zip drive to work, I had to revive and hook up and old computer with a parallel port. So there!

Let this completely pointless rant be a lesson to all geeks and non-geeks out there – if it looks like it might have anything to do with technology, do not throw it away. You never know when you might need your old toaster, a broken microwave oven and a 10-year-old floppy drive to build an evil robot and take over the world!