Recently I retired a few electronic goodies, sending them out to my office boneyard in the garage. While rearranging items to make room, I found an old IBM Laptop case. I became enchanted. “Hey,” I thought, “I wonder what’s inside?”

Lamentably, I didn’t find an old IBM laptop. It was gone. But the case still contained remnants from my last trip with that laptop, probably around 1998 time frame.

Again, why do I hang on to this stuff?

Figure 1 shows the laptop bag. You can’t get a gauge of size, but it’s a big bag. That IBM laptop was probably a 12-pounder, 1½-inches thick, and featured floppy and optical drives. You needed a case that bulky for the thing, but this particular IBM case had shock-absorbers in it. Pretty cool. I probably paid way too much for it.

Figure 1. My old IBM Laptop bag, with a lot of dust from 16 years of storage.

Minus the laptop, I did find a host of things inside the bag, as you can see in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Contents of my old Laptop bag, dumped on the floor.

Here’s the rundown of what I included in my laptop bag back in the mid-1990s and why it was necessary:

• A “love you forever” anniversary card from my now x-wife. She probably gave this to me on an outing when I took the laptop bag. I believe it was to San Francisco.

• A brief proposal for DOS For Dummies II, which was to be more of a Stupid DOS Tricks type of title. That piece of paper helps me to better pinpoint the last time I used the case, which was probably the 1997-1998 timeframe.

• Another piece of paper with an agenda. It was from the Power Summit of For Dummies authors, which took place on March 15, 1995 at some San Francisco hotel. I remember David Pogue, Andy Rathbone, maybe Deke McClelland, and myself in attendance. It was theater.

• An attendee badge from the 7th annual Waterside Computer Book Publishing Conference. That was in 1997, I believe.

• Office supplies, pens, sticky notes, business cards.

• Bill Bryson’s book Notes from a Small Island. He’s such a wonderful author. If you want to know more about the English language, read his book The Mother Tongue.

• The IBM Thinkpad 365X/XD User’s Guide. Yes, boys and girls, they once had half-inch thick User’s Guides that came with computers. Those were the days.

• Some antacid pills. I was 30-something years old and I didn’t yet know how to eat correctly.

• Phone cables. Yep, that’s the way you went online back in the 1990s. You had to bring the phone cable so that your laptop’s modem could use the hotel room’s phone to dial out.

• 36¢ worth of change.

• Three floppy disks. Now this one has me excited! I wonder what treasures I saved on those disks, what magical memories they could contain?

So I hooked up my USB floppy drive and checked them out.

One of the diskettes was blank. Another contained some WordPerfect 5 documents, which I’m unable to read. They look like they were from a presentation I gave as two of the files are named HANDOUT.WP5 and SPEECH.WP5. I’ll have to dig into those later.

The third diskette contained random files, some of which I recognize from my early books, but nothing like “Oh my! I remember that fondly.” Still, it’s pleasing to me to have a mini-time capsule of sorts. I just wish the laptop was still in the bag.