NET RESULTS:FOR CHEAP entertainment, you can't beat cleaning up your home office - although I am afraid that going on my experience, the amount of entertainment you get out of it is in inverse proportion to how successful you are at accomplishing the intended task.
I'd been dreading tackling the room for ages, but the time had come where some furniture needed to be moved around into a more efficient configuration, and messy stacks of who-knows-what that had been gathering in impromptu containers (the top half of a cat litter box, anyone?) sorted through and discarded.
Some bookshelves needed to be dismantled and moved as well, requiring me to take a look at stuff I'd packed in willy-nilly in a kind of sloppy, paper-based imitation of a stone wall. Spaces above the books and below the next shelf were wedged tight with things that in some cases, I hadn't looked at in well over a decade.
Thus began a process of discovery that made the cleaning up part take a lot longer than anticipated.
Because really, how could I not look at those ancient software manuals for programs so old they demanded Windows 3.1 for cutting-edge performance? Or pass by taking a trip down memory lane (or more appropriately, Ye Olde Electric Avenue) by stumbling across operating manuals for digital devices I once owned? For example, my Handspring! How Jetsons-like I imagined myself when I bought that early version of a PDA. These days a cheap mobile phone does far more than these once very exciting handhelds.
I also discovered my shelves held a tiny museum of storage media: large soft floppies, small hard floppies, DOS formatted ZIP disks from Maxell (anyone remember those? They were the big thing in big home storage back in the day). CDs readable and writable. Early USB "thumb drives", without enough memory to store even a single digital photograph today.
As usual, there was the electronic spaghetti of cords, connectors and adapters for things that shall remain a mystery.
But I think the crème de la crème of the cleanup was stumbling across my old QUE computer and Internet dictionary which I bought around 1995 or 96. How can I tell? Because the cover tells me that it "contains the most complete and up-to-date definitions including: Windows 95, Windows NT, the Internet, and Mac/PowerMac".
When I picked up this handy little reference volume way back, I was young enough to have little sense of how quickly technology changes and becomes obsolete. I never imagined this much older me, re-finding a book that would one day have entertainment value for quaint entries relating to technologies that at the time, were the bee's knees.
I mean, how perfect is this entry for "newsgroup"? It reads, "In a bulletin board system (BBS) such as The WELL or a distributed bulletin board system such as EchoMail or USENET, a discussion group that's devoted to a single topic such as Star Trek, model aviation, the books of Ayn Rand, or the music of the Grateful Dead."
Utterly magnificent. Sociologists of the distant future could parse that sentence and then perfectly reconstruct the classic geek personality of the early internet era.
There are some handy tips too, for someone in the market for a new computer at a time when a person might still have been more familiar with a command line interface rather than a windows-based screen, and have reservations about needing anything other than a monochrome monitor.
The reader is advised, "When shopping for a monitor, remember that colour has its advantages . . . most programs permit you to configure the on-screen colours, so you can simulate a paper white monitor (black text on a white background) if you want." Imagine: buying a colour monitor in order to re-create a black-and-white printed page.
The dictionary is quite excited about the internet. It carefully distinguishes between the "internet" in lowercase, the term it uses for an internal company intranet (interestingly, a word completely missing from the dictionary), and the public upper-case "Internet", which at that time would still have been primarily restricted to academia, government organisations, and large companies.
"Almost anyone can gain access to the Internet," the dictionary advises, stating that students should ask their universities about how to go about it, while noting that "increasingly, for-profit electronic mail services (such as CompuServe and MCI) offer Internet gateways"- ie, the dawn of home Internet access.
It sure was a different world. Although I discarded much of my technological flotsam this week, I've saved the dictionary for another look the next time I sort out my home office - no doubt, in another decade.
