620 South Lakewood Avenue, 2002

I spent all of my available time from Friday morning to after midnight on Monday working on a video project for WRI. Much of this was in direct communication with a remote video editing team, but there were sections of time where they were working and I needed to be on call near a computer. So I busied myself with some digital archaeology.

The path to the rabbit hole began with a simple question I had about my old 68K Macs, and I spent a fair bit of downtime on Sunday shuttling machines up and down the stairs to boot up and check out. At some point I’d wiped and formatted two of my legacy machines for looking through legacy files; it’s been so long since then that I forgot what I’d done. So a lot of this was a pleasant surprise. I made a list of all of the legacy machines, their specs, their OS condition, and any notes needed to make repairs or updates to each one.

Then I got to thinking about files. I’ve got CD’s burned with working files that date back to 1997 containing work I did all the way back to 1995. When I organized the drives on the basement server I copied a lot of it to a new disk. But there are things I know I had that I couldn’t find, so I dug deeper. Buried within some of these disks I found more of what I was looking for:

• Old backups of my original website, the first and second versions, which I’d thought were lost to time
• Old pictures of the Scout, which I also thought were lost to time. I remember taking a lot of pictures back then; the number of good ones I have of that truck are strangely few
• Work backups from Back In The Day—my first two pro jobs, to be exact
• An archive of the Mad Puppy work I did with Robby, back in the day, which I thought was lost forever on a scratched CD drive
• Email backups from 2002-2006 (gotta figure out how to save these in a viable format)
• Pictures of my first house, many of which I only had small thumbnail versions of. Gonna find something good to do with those
• Various writing projects, some of which make me cringe rereading them 20 years later; some of which make me feel good. I found something I wrote about driving up to Grandma’s funeral that I thought was lost forever
• Backups of the old IHCDigest from 1998
• Tons of my site archives from System Source, from the Wild West days of web development (I miss that time)

There’s more to sift through but for now I think I’m done.