Occasionally I browse my published archives. They don’t go back all the way since I lost a bunch of files when I upgraded computers in the 1990s. So some stuff is all gone now, but what about the oddball files that remain for other books?

The oldest files I have are from a computer manual I wrote in 1986, shown in Figure 1. I don’t list this titla as a “book” in my list of titles; my name isn’t anywhere on the manual. It was more of a souvenir to me than a major writing accomplishment.

Figure 1. The MouseTalk manual, one of the earliest pieces of text I have in the archives,

I knew the man who wrote the software, Bill Blue. He hired me to write the MouseTalk manual, which he then extensively edited. I like the final product, though it was for the Apple II platform and Apple had effectively killed that line. Sad.

As another aside, as I recall, Bill’s partner at the software firm screwed him over royally. It took a long time for me to get paid for the manual because of all the shenanigans going on with the developer.

My point?

I still have the files for the MouseTalk manual. They were written in WordPerfect 4.2 and they dwell in an archive folder on my computer. I cannot preview them and Microsoft Word refuses to open the files in any format other an “recover text from any document.”

Because the files have been transferred from so many computers (PC to Mac, back and forth), the files’ dates are all wrong. The folder shows each file with a creation date of Jan 1, 1970, 12:00 AM. That would be about 16 years too early. File date stamps are one of the things that seldom survive an operating system transfer, even an operating system upgrade.

To open the files in their native format, I use the DOSBox utility. I have an ancient copy of WordPerfect 5.1 that I can still use to open the files. And, naturally, DOSBox is DOS so it’s not the easiest thing to use. (Perhaps someone should have written a book about that . . . ?)

In Figure 2, you see WordPerfect 5.1 in a DOSBox editing the first chapter in the MouseTalk manual, which is probably the first time I’ve opened that document in 30 years. (WordPerfect has to convert the file to open it. Another anachronism.)

Figure 2. The oldest archived file I have, in context.

So why do I keep the files?

Nostalgia. I don’t need the files for any reason. They don’t occupy a great amount of space, but that’s not an issue: I have a file server on which I could archive everything. It contains backups, but that’s not the point.

I suppose, I keep these old files out of habit. I just shove a project into a folder and forget it about it. I have complete records since the mid-1990s. So I suppose that as long as I’m somehow able to finagle the files open, they’ll stick around.