Media and file formats
This is a follow up to my post from last week. The first of two. A comment to that post posed a few questions that I felt called for answers too long to fit into a comment. I thought I'd address the technical side of things first.
When I was little I was a bit of a storyteller. I'd make up elaborate stories and tell them to anyone who'd listen. My father was encouraging of this. Certain other people weren't. When I was in the sixth grade someone suggested I start writing my stories down instead of simply telling them. I began just that. I filled several spiral notebooks with my scrawl. Most of these are lost. I think my mother threw them out when she found them.
Between the sixth and ninth grades I relied on recording my stories in handwritten form. I did type stuff from time to time. (I've been typing since Kindergarten. Which is kind of weird since I'm pretty sure I didn't actually start reading until later than that.) I even used the computer from time to time. However at the time the computer at home was a TRS-80 Color Computer with a cassette drive. Retrieving saved data files from cassette was more often than not a study in frustration. Fortunately I had a printed and was able to print things out after typing them. Sadly most of that stuff is lost. I think I may have some samples packed away in a box somewhere that I may still have and might even find again one day.
In the ninth grade I had a wonderful english teacher who read over the stuff I had been writing and was very encouraging. She advised me to use the computer and store my files on floppy disk. She recommended keeping it all on one floppy. It seemed like a good idea so I did just that for the most part for the rest of my high school years. Though it ended up being several floppies. The computers are school were all Apple II models. At home I had access to my old Color Computer and an IBM AT PC. By this time I'd gotten a disk drive for the Color Computer. I ended up with a disk of my writings for each of these different platforms. And at one point I ran out of room on the original disks and added other disks.
I eventually moved my writings on the Color Computer over to the PC. I used a couple different methods. At first I used a null modem, cobbled together from spare parts, to connect the CoCo to an MS-DOS machine and transferred files via comm program. A little later I found some utilities for the CoCo that could read and write MS-DOS discs. Sadly I was never able to do this with the Apple II stuff and those writings are lost. I still have the discs but I doubt they're still readable after almost a quarter century.
In time I switched from 5.25" disks to 3.5" disks. The disks containing my writings were among the first things copied to the new media. Later it all got copied to a single 100MB Zip disk. And when I got my first CD writer I dumped all of it on to one of the first CD-ROMs I ever put together. For many years after that I made a habit of making archive compilations of current projects and old materials every few months. When I got my first DVD writer I naturally copied all existing project archive CDs to a set of DVD-ROMs. Recently I've copied all this stuff on to a removeable hard drive with the intent of going through it, removing duplicate files, and figuring out how much of the really old stuff is salvageable. After eliminating duplicates I've found my writings folder to be about 200MB.
This shifting old stuff to new media formats is essential to keeping stuff over the long haul. Magnetic media has a shockingly short life span when it comes to data storage and CD-R and DVD-R media aren't really all that much better.
File formats pose more of a problem. I've used many different software packages and applications over the years. VIP Writer on the CoCo; PCED, WP5.1, MS Word, Star Office, OpenOffice, Abiword, etc. I can't remember what the word processing applications I used on the Apple II were called. I seem to recall there being three different programs.
For the most part I haven't bothered to move stuff from one application's format to another. In the earliest times conversion filters were pretty nonexistant for migration between different word processing packages. The stuff I've been keeping all this time is a veritable stew of different file formats. So, far I haven't found a file that I couldn't read using at least one of the packages I have installed on my computers now. I should go through and see about converting everything to newer formats for ease of use though.
When I was little I was a bit of a storyteller. I'd make up elaborate stories and tell them to anyone who'd listen. My father was encouraging of this. Certain other people weren't. When I was in the sixth grade someone suggested I start writing my stories down instead of simply telling them. I began just that. I filled several spiral notebooks with my scrawl. Most of these are lost. I think my mother threw them out when she found them.
Between the sixth and ninth grades I relied on recording my stories in handwritten form. I did type stuff from time to time. (I've been typing since Kindergarten. Which is kind of weird since I'm pretty sure I didn't actually start reading until later than that.) I even used the computer from time to time. However at the time the computer at home was a TRS-80 Color Computer with a cassette drive. Retrieving saved data files from cassette was more often than not a study in frustration. Fortunately I had a printed and was able to print things out after typing them. Sadly most of that stuff is lost. I think I may have some samples packed away in a box somewhere that I may still have and might even find again one day.
In the ninth grade I had a wonderful english teacher who read over the stuff I had been writing and was very encouraging. She advised me to use the computer and store my files on floppy disk. She recommended keeping it all on one floppy. It seemed like a good idea so I did just that for the most part for the rest of my high school years. Though it ended up being several floppies. The computers are school were all Apple II models. At home I had access to my old Color Computer and an IBM AT PC. By this time I'd gotten a disk drive for the Color Computer. I ended up with a disk of my writings for each of these different platforms. And at one point I ran out of room on the original disks and added other disks.
I eventually moved my writings on the Color Computer over to the PC. I used a couple different methods. At first I used a null modem, cobbled together from spare parts, to connect the CoCo to an MS-DOS machine and transferred files via comm program. A little later I found some utilities for the CoCo that could read and write MS-DOS discs. Sadly I was never able to do this with the Apple II stuff and those writings are lost. I still have the discs but I doubt they're still readable after almost a quarter century.
In time I switched from 5.25" disks to 3.5" disks. The disks containing my writings were among the first things copied to the new media. Later it all got copied to a single 100MB Zip disk. And when I got my first CD writer I dumped all of it on to one of the first CD-ROMs I ever put together. For many years after that I made a habit of making archive compilations of current projects and old materials every few months. When I got my first DVD writer I naturally copied all existing project archive CDs to a set of DVD-ROMs. Recently I've copied all this stuff on to a removeable hard drive with the intent of going through it, removing duplicate files, and figuring out how much of the really old stuff is salvageable. After eliminating duplicates I've found my writings folder to be about 200MB.
This shifting old stuff to new media formats is essential to keeping stuff over the long haul. Magnetic media has a shockingly short life span when it comes to data storage and CD-R and DVD-R media aren't really all that much better.
File formats pose more of a problem. I've used many different software packages and applications over the years. VIP Writer on the CoCo; PCED, WP5.1, MS Word, Star Office, OpenOffice, Abiword, etc. I can't remember what the word processing applications I used on the Apple II were called. I seem to recall there being three different programs.
For the most part I haven't bothered to move stuff from one application's format to another. In the earliest times conversion filters were pretty nonexistant for migration between different word processing packages. The stuff I've been keeping all this time is a veritable stew of different file formats. So, far I haven't found a file that I couldn't read using at least one of the packages I have installed on my computers now. I should go through and see about converting everything to newer formats for ease of use though.