I’m sorting through a lot of my old computer crap that has followed me through the years in an effort to clean up the home office front. While rebuilding my server and dumping old cases will help a great deal, there’s still tons of old CDs and floppies lying around for no particular reason. This clutter is just killing my desk, and it’s got to go. And we’re talking a lot of unredeemable crap, too. These aren’t backups of old projects and creative endeavors (ok, maybe a few are). Instead, this is a repository of outdated programs and irrelevant drivers. I mean, do I really still need the installation disk for my original 2x DVD drive that required a separate decoder card? What about the 8 disks that comprised Adobe PhotoShop 3.05? Perhaps it is time that I moved the few remaining backups from those days onto CD.
In the meantime, I thought I might share some of the gems that have been found scattered throughout this mess. While there are many interesting bootleg copies of outdated software (hey, PFS: First Choice was an awesome wordprocessing program for its time), there’s a bizarre assortment of honest-to-goodness original disks that have cropped up, including the following drivers:
- Gateway Solo 5100 – my first laptop from a college internship
- Multiple Adaptec cards, as well as several versions of MaxBlast Plus (from Maxtor)
- Lexmark 5700 – my first inkjet (back when the cheap ones were a couple hundred dollars)
- Diamond Stealth64 (DRAM) – one of the first video cards I ever bought that listed how much memory it included.
- Three different Sound Blaster cards and the above mentioned Dxr2 DVD drive
- Various joysticks and mouses for Windows 3.11
- EtherDisk versions 3.1, 4.1, and 5.3, not to mention a disk for the Netgear FA310TX (famous for the fact that Windows NT 4.0 actually detected it during installation)
Speaking of Windows NT 4.0, I also found the ever-elusive 3 startup disks. Beyond that we have a paper airplane program from who-knows-when, and a photo library on 4 floppies (that’s right – 200 pictures in about 4 megs). The greatest find, however, is a tossup between an AOL 3.0 Program Disk, and all 8 disks (1 startup and 7 game) for the 256 color version of King’s Quest V.
Okay, so obviously I’m not getting rid of some of those prizes, but I think I can finally let go of the 4 year old ABIT drivers. Next up is going through the pirated copies of such treasures as Print Shop Deluxe and WordPerfect (version 5.1, of course).
P.S.(If you recognized half of what I was talking about, you should probably add a good 15-20 points to your nerd score.)