One of my goals this Christmas holiday vacation time is to clear out some of the deadwood from the computer stuff closet in my front office.  It’s a daunting task because I have the pack rat gene…I have it bad…and the stuff in that closet is a deadly mix of old computer technology that I can fashion a zillion plausible scenarios for needing once again, and stuff that I’ll never need again but has sentimental value.  You know you’re dealing with a computer geek when he says that his old PC-XP motherboard manual has sentimental value.  But that was the first computer I ever built myself.

I have tons of old manuals, some from application software I’ll never use again, some for programming languages and development environments I’ll never use again, some for programming languages and development environments I never used to begin with, but thought I might.  The books for Visual J++ being a good example of the latter.  Oh…and Visual InterDev.  Anyone remember that?  I have my first Windows Technical Manual…for Windows 3.11.  I have my books for IBM PC DOS 3.1.  I have the manuals for my favorite word processor of all time, XyWrite for DOS.  Parting with that old friend when it got left behind in the trek to Windows, long file names, the Internet and modern printers was hard.  I have never liked GUI word processors.  But then I have never cared how my words look on paper, only how they scan and read.

I bought several more Rubbermaid storage containers for the task.  I’m going to divide the contents of the closet to stuff that I will likely need to get my hands on to do the work I do now, and maintain the computer network here at Casa del Garrett – stuff that I want to keep but can safely put into storage in the basement or under the backyard deck – and stuff that I can muster up the courage to throw into the Baltimore City paper and electronics recycling bins.  The thing that keeps my pack rat gene in check is I hate living in clutter.  I absolutely hate it.  So when the volume of…stuff…reaches a critical level I can work up enough ruthlessness to throw or give things away I figure I don’t need anymore, and just accept the fact that as soon as I’ve done it I’ll find a use for all of it after all.  Oh look…an article on how to hook a modem up to a shortwave radio and listen in on teletype traffic…Damn…I KNEW I shouldn’t have thrown away that 2400 baud modem!!!

I’ve already got two big contractor’s trash backs full of stuff to take to the city recycling/trash drop-off and I haven’t even gotten into the hardware shelves or the massive floppy disc/CD rom collection.  Some of that stuff may not even be readable anymore.  But I’ll go through it all, one at a time, and find stuff I can toss out.  The rest will go into storage bins and probably live under the basement staircase until I can convince myself that it really is worthless now.  I do all my computer tinkering now in Linux.  The old DOS stuff has sentimental value, but no practical value anymore.  As I was going through the old manuals I found myself remembering moments from the past, when the personal computer was still a new thing and nobody quite knew what to make of them, or what brave new world they would usher in.  I lived back then in a world before the Internet, where primitive amateur computer networks employed modems and batch scripts that called neighboring BBS systems at night, when the long distance charges were low.  I thought I knew what loneliness was back then, but those were happier times.  And I still had a future to look toward, and all the time in the world to find a boyfriend.

So I lay hands on this and that in the computer closet, and the pack rat gene says to me that all these things I am throwing away are me.  But they aren’t.  They are sea shells I have found on the beach and they delighted me for a time.  But there is too much of it to carry with me further on down the shore.  So some of it I’ll leave behind for some other kid to find and play with…perhaps…and the rest I’ll toss back into the sea.  The nice thing about recycling is that this stuff can get to have another go around at life even if I don’t.  Maybe that old DOS 6 manual will come back someday as a novel that will find a home on some other kid’s bookshelf, a treasured favorite.