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Cool Old Stuff

Entry 805, on 2008-06-30 at 20:19:02 (Rating 1, Activities)

In the near future my work office is going to have new heating installed and have new carpet laid. That means everything will have to be cleared out so the work can be done. If you have ever seen my office you will know this is a lot more scary than you might initially think. Not only are there 8 working computers in there, but there are also another 5 to 10 which are being stored or worked on. And there are piles of peripherals, CDs, manuals, and all sorts of other geeky stuff.

So I decided (well one of my more organised colleagues decided for me) that I should have a multi-phase clean up and get rid of some of the old stuff. Phase one involved throwing out about a hundred old empty software and hardware boxes. Phase 2 involved a lot of old computer equipment like 20 MB hard disks. Phase 3 involved about 10 old computers, such as Power Mac 6100s. And phase 4 (which occurred today) involved hundreds of old manuals.

Some of this stuff went back to the 1980s so, in computer terms, it was almost prehistoric. But it did make me realise how much cool stuff is no longer used. There were so many nice programs (which in some cases cost heaps at the time) which are now either completely dead or have faded into insignificance.

One of my favourites was Word Perfect, a very fast and efficient word processor for the Mac (and PC) which was killed by the dominance of Microsoft Word. Another was Quark XPress, a program which is still around but is almost irrelevant to me now because I now only publish material on-line instead of on paper. And then there was Fourth Dimension, a capable database manager which is irrelevant now because I have Unix tools (MySQL) which do the type of database functions I need much better.

But I also found user manuals and documentation for my own programming projects, I had forgotten how much cool stuff I had written in the early years of my programming career (about 25 years ago). Some of the programs were quite innovative for the time. For example, I wrote a cashbook program for the Apple III (yes, that's right) which used a windowing environment when the only other commercial window system at the time was the Lisa. And I wrote some nice assembly language code for the Apple II and ZX81 which made things happen really fast!

But the ultimate find was a stack of punch cards which represented my first serious computer program. I wrote it when I was a student for the University's Burroughs B6700 mainframe computer and it was a lunar lander program. This classic game requires the player to fire the lander's engines just the right amount to land it on the Moon. The Burroughs batch queue was only run once per day so each burn had to be submitted through a punch card and it could take many weeks to land the lander! Computer interactivity has moved on a bit since then!

As I said, I threw out hundreds of old manuals, literally over 100 kgs worth. I compared that with the documentation I now have on my computer's hard disk and I estimate I probably have several times more in the form of PDFs and text manuals now. So even away from the Internet I have access to many times as much data just on one small hard drive, and on the Internet I can get thousands of times as much.

I haven't used printed documentation for many years so I'm doing my bit for the dream of the paperless office. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to have caught on with many of my colleagues - some of them still print emails! Maybe in a few more years computers will have advanced as much as they have since I used punch cards of the 6700. Maybe then the paperless idea will become a reality!

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