In my quest to archive my past on the net, I have come across the decaying ruins of more than I ever remember building . Floppys full of files and backup disks littered with designs for Geocities websites I'm not even sure I ever got around to actually loading. This was back before Yahoo bought them, when your address was a paragraph long and contained a "regions" - mine was Olympus , and a four number extension!
I fear this is going to take much - much - longer than I bargained for.On the content side of things, I have recovered a decent amount of work. So far the list includes: six magazine articles, the bulk or my first blog (which isn't much) and twelve pieces of poetry. A good base, but that isn't even a fourth of the poetry I wrote.
Recovery of the lyric may just be the most difficult. Whereas I could just find the original sites or backup Word files for the newer works, the poetry is the oldest and therefore, poses a challenge . Much of it was written and stored on an old Brother word processor . The trick is getting Windows to read the old 3.5 floppys and getting the data off.
Alas, it doesn't end there, even if you are lucky enough to read the disk, you then have to open the files. And like all things - the Brother used a proprietary file format. And although its based on the TXT system and Windows can read the raw file, the result simply is not worth using due to all the junk characters that would have to be cleaned out. Take a step back, and bask in the glow of that early 90's technology!
Being the pack rat that I am and living by the mantra : "Never throw anything tech related away" - I started to dig in my "box 'o crap." Though the word processor was long gone, or at the least, permanently buried in the basement, I still had the collection of disks that came with the system. And lo, and behold, among them was a conversion program. The Holy Grail: convert right from Brother formats to Windows!
Well as it turns out it was more like the "Whole-y Grail" - a DOS program. This ancient piece of code, ran on my system with no problem but that was the extent of it. The newest version of Word it could spit out was 2.0 For some context, Vista, whenever it ships, will support the Office 12 - meaning that there have been 10+ versions of Word since the Brother software was written. But, given the circumstances, this would have been fine, had it be able to read the floppy with the files I wanted. And of course, it wasn't able to. That would be too easy!
So I'm basically back to where I started, well, that and I now know where all my file are, even if they aren't really useful or accessible. I guess I'll just have to input by hand from the archive copies that I printed out on that noisy daisy wheel printer a decade ago.
Now where did I put that damn binder?