{"id":8191,"date":"2016-03-28T00:01:41","date_gmt":"2016-03-28T07:01:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=8191"},"modified":"2016-03-26T13:53:32","modified_gmt":"2016-03-26T20:53:32","slug":"old-files-i-keep-but-cant-open","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=8191","title":{"rendered":"Old Files I Keep But Can’t Open"},"content":{"rendered":"

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?
\n
\nThe 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<\/a>; my name isn’t anywhere on the manual. It was more of a souvenir to me than a major writing accomplishment.<\/p>\n

\"Figure

Figure 1. The MouseTalk manual, one of the earliest pieces of text I have in the archives,<\/p><\/div>\n

I knew the man who wrote the software, Bill Blue. He hired me to write the MouseTalk<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My point?<\/p>\n

I still have the files for the MouseTalk<\/em> 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.”<\/p>\n

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<\/code>. 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.<\/p>\n

To open the files in their native format, I use the DOSBox utility<\/a>. 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 . . . ?)<\/p>\n

In Figure 2, you see WordPerfect 5.1 in a DOSBox editing the first chapter in the MouseTalk<\/em> 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.)<\/p>\n

\"Figure

Figure 2. The oldest archived file I have, in context.<\/p><\/div>\n

So why do I keep the files?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have folders full of archives, packed with files now useless to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8191"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8206,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8191\/revisions\/8206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}