Last weekend I spent the bulk of two days cleaning up my man lair – or rather our extra bedroom where my computer and a bunch of other electronics live. It started out with a simple goal of swapping one bookcase with another and ended up as a monumental task of sifting through files, old magazines, and other bits. In all, I got rid of probably three full brown paper bags of paper. Stuff I didn’t even know I had.
I don’t think of myself as too much of a pack rat. Yes, there are things I collect. Wires, cables, cords…I can never have enough of them. Bolts, screws, and other assorted fasteners…I can never bring myself to throw any away. But in each of those cases I’m actually pretty organized in how I store them, plus I do use them quite a bit. On the other hand there’s stuff that’s not collected, but instead just remains. Old magazines with that one interesting article I’ll find time to read someday. Old computer game disc cases that seem like they may be of use later. Old files stuffed with paper that I haven’t looked at in years, but I think “if it was worth filing, isn’t it worth keeping” (btw, NO). This is the stuff that starts to crush you under its weight of irrelevance.
A lot of the stuff had come from college (or even before) and simply made the move over the years without much scrutiny. Brochures from colleges I was considering for a Masters. Correspondence with companies during my post-grad job hunt. Abstracts and white papers related to satellite construction and control systems. All of it about 12 years old. Among the more interesting finds was an issue of Popular Science from 1993. The cover exclaimed “New Brains for Personal Computers”. Inside the feature hailed the upcoming release of the Pentium processor with speeds up to 66MHz. Prices of the Pentium-equipped machines were stated to run $5000 to $8000. In the same issue, the “What’s New” section showed a color printer with a remarkably low price of $995. It claimed that the unit was much less expensive than other color printers because the processing was handled in software on DOS rather than in onboard hardware. Ah, good old Moore’s law has treated us well.
The dust continues to settle.
