Obsolete

Over the weekend I had a tidy up of the lair, it needed doing as I'd run out of shelf space and it looked a bloody mess to be honest - messy enough to start bothering me anyway.

So TV box sets of DVDs were put into little CD wallet things, papers were gone through and irrelevant stuff chucked out including instruction manuals for equipment I no longer own and I also threw out whole load of empty CD boxes and cover mounted CDs from computer magazines on the basis that I was highly unlikely to want to load a 2006 version of some 3d rendering program at any point in the foreseeable future and as my music making stuff just acts as a dust repository these days "1001 Chill Out Ibiza Samples" probably wasn't going to get installed either.

And then I came upon a box of floppy disks. Mostly these were old drivers and operating system boot disks from the days when that was how you got a brand new computer to spring into life but a few were labelled "Work code" and suchlike.

And I realised that I had absolutely no way of reading these disks. I don't possess a single computer that has a 3.5 inch floppy drive in them, not one. This data may just as well have been written on punched tape.

While we weren't looking the floppy disk died out like the dodo (apart from the fact we didn't eat all of them, like we did with dodos) and I wondered how many people put stuff onto floppies or zip disks and never got to transfer it to the shiny silver discs. I also wondered about how historians in the future are going to find out about people living now. I mean we have all of somebody like Winston Churchill's letters and papers so can find out more about the man and they're all on paper for anyone to read. Is anyone in a hundred years from now going to be able to access all the drivel I've written in emails, on this blog and the occasional tweet about gargling boiling wolf semen as well as the gigabytes of stuff on funny little disks that we don't have the ability to read any more? Well maybe not me but people more "important" than me, like that bastard Gordon Brown for example. Sure you might be able to track down a working 3.5" drive now but how about the real 5¼" floppys that really were floppy - and yes my first "real" PC, an 486SX clone, had one of them in it so I've used on within the last 20 years.

In the end I did find an old 3.5" drive in a box later in the day when looking for a double plug for Mrs Dracunculus.

Then I figured that I hadn't needed what was on those disks in at least 5 years and therefore probably didn't need them now.

So they went in the bin.