I’m in the process of harvesting files from my old Mac, in preparation for getting rid of it. I’m having to use floppies to transfer anything I want to keep, so that’s forcing me to be pretty selective. It’s just as well, I have no reasons beyond sentiment to keep anything.
However, I am definitely keeping all the old letters to friends, and the homemade graphics, and even some college papers and other writings. I haven’t looked at a lot of this in a very long time, and I am glad to have the chance to see it now.
This’ll be the first time since 1984 that I haven’t owned some sort of Apple computer. I’m not quite nostalgic enough to keep this one around, though. It’s a Performa, which was bad enough when it worked. The modem and ethernet card are both dead, and for years it hasn’t displayed any red in its colors.
I did that last November when I finally moved on from the Performa 5200 I’d had since 1995. I had to borrow a floppy drive from work to transfer stuff into my new iBook.
Have you thought of donating your old computer? That’s what I did, via Share the Technology, which has a searchable donation database, so you can find someone near where you are. They’ll usually come pick it up from you, even. A lot of the places that are requesting Macs say they’ll take anything from a Quadra on up, and they take old printers and stuff too.
Back in the olden days (1999), when I was getting 25% of my grade docked on essays because my margins weren’t a perfect inch (poor old typewriter), I caved and began using a 1984 Mac to write my papers. It wasn’t until 2000 that I obtained this spiffy new thing. Imagine my amazement that computers could show things in COLOR.