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I can relate to this. My Dad loved computer hardware. He grew up in Mauritius with not much, and I think the concept of getting rid of things which weren't broken was alien to him. He lived alone, and when he passed away a couple of years ago I went through the process of clearing his house and I really got to see the extent of it. Two BBCs, two Amigas, a ZX81, a dragon32 and it seemed like every floppy disk from my childhood. So much of it reignited memories I didn't realise were still in there. Old floppy disks with my handwriting on, some for games which I recognised from the disk even if I didn't remember the title, 3.5 inch floppies with a hole punched in the corner to make them high density (remembers that?) Despite always trying to encourage him to clean up his house I was so glad he kept it all. This time I took lots of pictures, donated the computers to a charity who takes old one, and most of the floppies are now in my loft. I tell myself I'll look through them at some imaginary point in the future. I also recovered over 40 hard disks from the various PCs in different states of repair. I went through about half soon after he died, and will go on with more of them when I feel the need. Like you say, it feels a bit like checking in with him. I must have been 5 or 6 years old and I vividly remember staring as a screen of BASIC of some sort on a computer he'd brought home from a car boot sale or somewhere. I was trying to figure out how to assign a number to a variable. B = 1. Got that. B is now 1. But how do I add one to it? B + 1? Hmmmm, why doesn't B change? etc etc. I went straight from school to code, and I have no idea what I'd be doing now if it wasn't for having computers around as a kid. It makes me think about the footprint I'd leave for my kids to discover now. It'd be pretty much all digital, but with storage being so plentiful these days, and with gmail's archive and things like Dropbox and cloud storage, you'd think it would stretch right back to their birth. I'm not deleting emails which I think might one day tell something about who I am, and am dumping the occasional thing in a Dropbox dir, so if I got hit by a bus there's be plenty of info to tell my kids about me. |
I'm sure you already know this, but, if you're serious about looking through them, please don't wait! I found an old cache of floppies myself a while back, and looked forward to a nostalgic stroll through their contents, but after less than 10 years almost half the content was corrupted.
It probably won't make a huge difference after all this time anyway, but please at least archive to a more durable medium while you wait!
(Of course, maybe I've missed the point and just the pleasure of having them is worth more than any data you might get off them—in which case, don't mind me.)